Colin Hancock is giving his second chance his best shot. At 28, he's focused on getting his teaching degree and avoiding all the places and people that proved so destructive in his past. The last thing he's looking for is a serious relationship. But when he crosses paths with Maria Sanchez one rainswept night, his carefully structured life is turned upside down.

At 32, Russell Green has it all: a loving family, a successful career and a beautiful house. But underneath his seemingly perfect life, cracks are beginning to appear...and no one is more surprised than Russ when the life he took for granted is turned upside down.

Alice is stifled, bored, and misunderstood. So when she meets wealthy and handsome American, Bennett Van Cleve, she is quickly swept off her feet. Marrying him and moving to America seems like a great adventure - but life as a newlywed in stuffy Baileyville, Kentucky, is not at all what she hoped for. Until, that is, she responds to a call for volunteers to start a travelling library, surprising herself by saying yes, before her husband can say no.

Christmas on the remote Scottish island of Mure is bleak, stark - and incredibly beautiful. It's a time for hunkering down, getting cosy in front of whisky barrel wood fires and enjoying a dram with the people you love - unless, of course, you're accidentally pregnant to your ex-boss and don't know how to tell him. In what should be the season of peace and goodwill on earth, will Joel think Flora is a bearer of glad tidings?

1946: World War II has ended and all over the world, young women are beginning to fulfill the promises made to the men they wed in wartime. In Sydney, Australia, four women join 650 other war brides on an extraordinary voyage to England - aboard HMS Victoria, which still carries not just arms and aircraft but a thousand naval officers. Rules are strictly enforced, from the aircraft carrier’s captain down to the lowliest young deckhand. But the men and the brides will find their lives intertwined despite the Navy’s ironclad sanctions.