Life in Sweden seems like an endless winter for three sisters after their mother's and father's suicides. Ellin writes to her relatives in Chicago, pleading for help. Joining 16 million other immigrants who leave their homelands for America between 1890 and 1920, Ellin, Kirsten, and Sofia begin the long, difficult journey fraught with hardships.

Ingrid Larsen, a young Swedish immigrant, arrives in Michigan in 1871 to search for her brother who has disappeared into the woods to work the dangerous lumber camps. Destitute and barely hanging on to hope, she encounters a newly-widowed farmer who is struggling to raise five children on his own. Marriage would solve both of their problems, and so Ingrid proposes to a man she barely knows. She will fight to protect her new family-- but the hardest...

"A young Swedish boy finds himself in penniless and alone in California. He travels East in search of his brother, moving on foot against the great push to the West. Driven back over and over again on his journey through vast expanses, Håkan meets naturalists, criminals, religious fanatics, Indians, and lawmen, and his exploits turn him into a legend. Diaz defies the conventions of historical fiction and genre (travel narratives, the bildungsroman,...