Returning to Egdon Heath from Paris, Clym Yeobright intends to settle down and improve the lives of his townspeople. But the alluring and mysterious Eustacia Vye has other plans. She believes Clym can provide the cosmopolitan life she craves, if only they return to Paris. When their ideals prove incompatible, desperation breeds tragedy, and lives are changed in ways Clym and Eustacia never could have foretold.

When Mr. Dashwood dies, he leaves his second wife and her three daughters at the mercy of his son and heir, John. John's wife convinces him to turn his step-mother and half-sisters out, and they move to a country cottage, rented to them by a distant relative. In their newly reduced circumstances Elinor and Marianne, the two eldest daughters, wrestle with ideas of romance and reality and their apparent opposition to each other. Elinor struggles

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In 1854, beautiful, adventurous Rosa Barr travels to the Crimean battlefield with Florence Nightingale's nursing corps--then disappears without a trace. When Mariella Lingwood, Rosa's cousin, leaves her surgeon husband's side to follow the trail of her elusive cousin to Sebastopol, she encounters Rosa's dashing stepbrother, a reckless cavalry officer whose complex past -- and future -- is inextricably...