Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack--the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years--comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

Chaos erupts in the Rubinstein household when Olympia's twin daughters are invited to New York's most exclusive debutante ball--with one twin and Olympia's current husband refusing to attend, and the other young woman and Olympia's snobbish ex-husband already shopping for the event.

Siddalee Walker, a successful theater director, is thrown into a void of uncertainty when she has a falling out with her mother over a New York Times article in which Vivi is characterized as an abusive parent, and the Ya-Yas, Vivi's gang of lifelong girlfriends, conspire to restore the mother-daughter relationship.

"Wandering Stars traces the legacies of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 and the Carlisle Industrial School for Indians through to the shattering aftermath of Orvil Redfeather's shooting in There There"-- Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion Prison Castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found...

Their grandfathers had hated each other, their fathers had hated each other, and as the next generation, Hannah and Rafe were expected to hate each other, too. But their feelings for each other were stronger than any family feud.