"Barkskins opens in New France in the late 18th century as Rene Sel, an illiterate woodsman makes his way from Northern France to the homeland to seek a living. Bound to a "seigneur" for three years in exchange for land, he suffers extraordinary hardship and violence, always in awe of the forest he is charged with clearing. In the course of this epic novel, Proulx tells the stories of Rene's children, grandchildren, and great grandchildren, as well...

In 1790, Lavinia, a seven-year-old Irish orphan with no memory of her past, arrives on a tobacco plantation where she is put to work as an indentured servant with the kitchen house slaves. Though she becomes deeply bonded to her new family, Lavinia is also slowly accepted into the world of the big house, where the master is absent and the mistress battles opium addiction. As time passes she finds herself perilously straddling two very different worlds...

In 1352 England, seventeen-year-old Annabel, granddaughter of a knight and a would-be nun, eludes a lecherous bailiff but falls in love with Lord Le Wyse, the ferocious and disfigured man to whom her family owes three years of indentured servitude, in this tale loosely based on Beauty and the Beast.

Magnus MacLeish and Lark MacDougall grew up on the same castle grounds. Magnus is now laird of the great house and the Isle of Kerrera; Lark is but the keeper of his bees and the woman he is hoping will provide a tincture that might help his ailing wife conceive and bear him an heir. When his wife dies suddenly, Magnus and Lark find themselves caught up in a whirlwind of accusations, expelled from their beloved island, and sold as indentured servants...

When she runs away after her master dies, indentured servant Patience Martin is accused of stealing and needs the help of a young Benjamin Franklin to prove her innocence.

On the Mississippi River, indentured servant Fanny Beck has been forced to sing for riverboat passengers since she was a girl. As her contract comes to an end, she discovers that the captain has no intention of releasing her. An impulse leads Fanny to a group of enslaved people who are on their own dangerous quest for liberty. When Fanny is presumed drowned, Sloan Kirkpatrick, the riverboat's captain, sets off to find her replacement. His journey...

"In Kushiel's Dart, a daring young courtesan uncovered a plot to destroy her beloved homeland. But hers is only half the tale. Now see the other half of the heart that lived it. Cassiel's Servant is a retelling of cult favorite Kushiel's Dart from the point of view of Joscelin, Cassiline warrior-priest and protector of Phèdre nó Delaunay. He's sworn to celibacy and the blade as surely as she's pledged to pleasure, but the gods they serve have bound...

Fourteen-year-old Rachel Marsh, an indentured servant in the Boston household of John and Abigail Adams, is caught up in the colonists' unrest that eventually escalates into the massacre of March 5, 1770.

Phèdre nó Delaunay is a woman born with a scarlet mote in her left eye and sold into indentured servitude as a child. Her bond was purchased by a nobleman, and he was the first one to recognize who and what she is: one pricked by Kushiel's Dart, chosen to forever experience pain and pleasure as one. Phèdre's path has taken a strange and sometimes dangerous course, and through it all she has had the devoted swordsman Joscelin at her side, who knew...