Amateur baker Claire Walker is thrilled to be a contestant on Britain’s Battle of the Bakers. She can almost smell the fresh pastries wafting through the air. If she can win the grand prize, she can ditch her teaching job and launch her baking career. The Viscount of Colburn, Jonathan Ainsley, is the custodian of Blackfirth Park and an eligible bachelor. He reluctantly agrees to allow the cooking competition show to film on his estate, but when a contestant is found dead soon after filming begins, Jonathan is forced to get involved.

In an arctic world that's getting colder every day, Lyriana's only hope of survival is to get her little brother Zave and herself to the fabled Orphan's Garden. It’s rumored to be the one place in the world not controlled by deadly Winter Spirits or ruled by the tyrant Giant king. In Orphan’s Garden, healing trees will melt away Winter’s pains, and Lyriana and Zave can live safely in the warmth of Spring. If the garden exists, they must find it. They won’t live much longer without it.

Ximena Reale has spent most of her life training at La Academia to join the Cazadores, seafaring hunters who track down pirates. But her future is uncertain, thanks to her parents’ questionable reputation. They were traitorous pirates, and though they were executed when Ximena and her sister were young, they permanently damaged the Reale name in the eyes of the Luzan Empire.

In 1940s Germany, Sophie is excited to discover a message waiting for her in the Bridegroom's Oak from a mysterious suitor. Meanwhile, her best friend, Hanna, is sending messages too—but not to find love. As World War II unfolds in their small town of Kleinwald, the oak may hold the key to resistance against the Nazis.

Birdie’s keeping it together; of course she is. So she’s a little hungover, sometimes, and she has to bring her daughter, Emaleen, to her job waiting tables at an Alaskan roadside lodge, but she’s getting by as a single mother in a tough town. Still, Birdie can remember happier times from her youth, when she was free in the wilds of nature. Arthur Neilsen, a soft-spoken and scarred recluse who appears in town only at the change of seasons, brings Emaleen back to safety when she gets lost in the woods. Most people avoid him, but to Birdie, he represents everything she’s ever longed for.