In rural 1930s Virginia, a young immigrant mother fights for her dignity and those she loves against America’s rising eugenics movement—when widespread support for policies of prejudice drove imprisonment and forced sterilizations based on class, race, disability, education, and country of origin—in this tragic and uplifting novel of social injustice, survival, and hope for listeners of Susan Meissner, Kristin Hannah, and Christina Baker Kline.

Everyone has a story to tell. But does Janice have the power to unlock her own? She can’t recall what started her collection. Maybe it was in a fragment of conversation overheard as she cleaned a sink? Before long (as she dusted a sitting room or defrosted a fridge) she noticed people were telling her their stories. Perhaps they had always done so, but now it is different, now the stories are reaching out to her and she gathers them to her.

It's 1983 and seventeen-year-old Grace Clark has just lost her mother when she begrudgingly accompanies her estranged father to an archeological dig at Olduvai Gorge on the Serengeti plains of Tanzania. Here, seventy-year-old Mary Leakey enlists Grace to sort and pack her fifty years of work and memories. Their interaction reminds Mary how she pursued her ambitions of becoming an archeologist in the 1930s by sneaking into lectures and working on excavations.

Anne Gallagher grew up enchanted by her grandfather’s stories of Ireland. Heartbroken at his death, she travels to his childhood home to spread his ashes. There, overcome with memories of the man she adored and consumed by a history she never knew, she is pulled into another time. The Ireland of 1921, teetering on the edge of war, is a dangerous place in which to awaken. But there Anne finds herself, hurt, disoriented, and under the care of Dr. Thomas Smith, guardian to a young boy who is oddly familiar.

Rare-book dealer Ashlyn Greer’s affinity for books extends beyond the intoxicating scent of old paper, ink, and leather. She can feel the echoes of the books’ previous owners—an emotional fingerprint only she can read. When Ashlyn discovers a pair of beautifully bound volumes that appear to have never been published, her gift quickly becomes an obsession. Not only is each inscribed with a startling incrimination, but the authors, Hemi and Belle, tell conflicting sides of a tragic romance.