Graduating magna cum laude from MIT is the happiest day of Billie Banks’s life, although her family is not part of it. Her mother, who always supported her, died when Billie was seventeen. Since then, her father has been slowly drinking himself to death on the family farm in Iowa, and she and her younger sister, Mickie, have grown even more estranged.

Devon Darcy’s reputation precedes her. As a highly sought-after portrait artist, she seems to have the ability to peer into the souls of her subjects and then capture them on canvas. But the world doesn’t know about the devastating losses she has endured, first as an orphan, then as a far-too-young widow. When entrepreneur Charles Mackenzie Taylor sees her at a New York gallery event, he is instantly haunted by her beauty and her talent. Having lost his mother when he was thirteen, and still living in the cold shadow of his late banker father’s disapproval, Charlie has given up on love.

After working as head designer for Oscar de la Renta, Eugenia Ward started her own company when she turned forty, fourteen years ago. She is now a major name in evening gowns and wedding gowns, ready-to-wear and haute couture. But with the fashion business in major downturn, she has recently suffered heavy losses, and Eugenia desperately needs new investors—and new ideas.

The plumbing was prone to leaks, the furniture rescued from garage sales. And every square inch was being devotedly restored to its original splendor - even as a relationship fell to pieces. Now Francesca Thayer, newly separated from her lawyer boyfriend Todd, is desperate. The owner of a struggling art gallery, and suddenly the sole mortgage payer on her Greenwich Village townhouse, Francesca does the math and then the unimaginable. She puts out an advertisement for boarders. Soon her house becomes a whole new world.

On the occasion of her daughter Valerie's wedding and her upcoming fiftieth birthday, bestselling author Halley Holbrook finds herself reflecting. Raising twins Valerie and Olivia is her proudest accomplishment. Halley has been able to give them the loving and safe home she never had, having survived a childhood so traumatic she's never talked about it with her girls. Long ago, Halley decided to live in the sunlight of the present, not the dark shadows of the past.

Every woman makes choices. And no one has made more difficult choices than Olivia Grayson. The enormously successful businesswoman missed out on much of her children’s lives while she built her legendary home-furnishings empire. In Danielle Steel’s character-rich novel, Olivia faces the past, tries to balance the present and make amends where due, while still running her vastly successful business. As a way of making up to them for time lost, Olivia spends months each year planning a holiday that everyone in her family will enjoy.

Oona Kelly Webster has much to be grateful for. A striking woman with red hair and green eyes, she has a loving family and a job she adores, editing a prestigious line of books. To celebrate their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary, she and her husband, Charles, have planned a visit to France. But then Charles drops a bombshell. He has been living a lie—hiding an affair for a year—and he is leaving Oona for a younger male lover.

Sybil and Blake Gregory have established a predictable, well-ordered Manhattan life—she as a cutting-edge design authority and museum consultant, he in high tech investments—raising their teenagers, Andrew and Caroline, and six-year-old Charlie. But everything changes when Blake is offered a dream job he can't resist as CEO of a start-up in San Francisco. He accepts it without consulting his wife and buys a magnificent, irresistibly underpriced historic Pacific Heights mansion as their new home.

With wit and intelligence, Danielle Steel explores love in all its guises, taking us into the lives of three unusual but wonderfully real couples. One Day at a Time is at once moving, thought provoking, and utterly impossible to put down.

Hope Dunne has carved out a name for herself as a top photographer, known the joys of marriage and motherhood and the heartbreak of loss. In her chic SoHo loft, Hope is content with her life, finding serenity and beauty through the lens of her camera. She isn't looking for a man or excitement. But these things find her when she accepts a last-minute assignment to fly to London at Christmas and photograph one of the world's most celebrated writers - an Irish-American author known for novels of thrilling literary darkness.

In July 1944, Arielle von Auspeck arrives at the glamorous Hotel Ritz in occupied Paris. Half French, half German, she is happy to be back in France, where her husband, Gregor, a retired colonel, will join her soon from Germany. Arielle and Gregor have thus far been able to hide their private opposition to Hitler. Then her world falls apart. She receives word that Gregor was part of Operation Valkyrie, a failed attempt to assassinate Hitler in Poland, and has been shot as a traitor.

Kezia Cooper Hobson, recently widowed, arrives in New York from San Francisco. Determined to make a fresh start, she has just completed the sale of her Pacific Heights home, not to mention her husband's venture capital firm, and in doing so, is also freed from her responsibility as a board member of the company. Bringing with her only a few personal treasures, she is excited to move into the blank slate of a beautiful midtown penthouse, in the city that she has always loved. It is also where her two adult daughters now live.

Alexandra Bouvier is born in Paris in 1900, at the dawn of a new century. From an early age, she is encouraged to think for herself by her enlightened family: her father, a French doctor; her mother, an American nurse; and her maternal grandfather a highly regarded newspaperman back in the Midwest. At age fourteen, Alex's comfortable life is upended as war erupts across Europe. Her parents follow their sense of duty to the front, performing triage at a field hospital and confronting the horrors of poison gas and trench warfare.

Stephanie Adams is a devoted stay-at-home mother, married to a successful lawyer in northern California, in a dead marriage she stayed in for years for the sake of her children. Then, on a ski trip in Squaw Valley, her fifty-two-year-old husband dies suddenly and all bets are off.

Valerie Wyatt is the queen of gracious living and the arbiter of taste with a successful TV show. Since her long-ago divorce, she’s worked hard to reach the pinnacle of her profession and to create a camera-ready life in her Fifth Avenue penthouse. So why is she so depressed? All the hours with her personal trainer, the careful work of New York’s best hairdressers, cosmetic surgeons, and her own God-given bone structure and great looks can’t fudge the truth or her lies about it: Valerie is turning sixty.