Hurtling past the downtrodden communities of Depression-era America, painter Val Welch travels westward to the rural town of Dawes, Wyoming. Through a stroke of luck, he’s landed a New Deal assignment to create a mural representing the region for their new Post Office. A wealthy art lover named John Long and his wife, Eve, have agreed to host Val at their sprawling ranch. Rumors and intrigue surround the couple, and Val quickly finds himself entranced by their lives. One day, Eve flees home with a valuable painting in tow, and Long recruits Val to hit the road with a mission of tracking her down. Journeying from ramshackle Hoovervilles to San Francisco nightclubs to the swamps of Florida, Val's search for Eve narrows, and he soon turns up secrets that could spark formidable changes for all of them.

Her marriage prospects limited, teenage Varina Howell agrees to wed the much-older widower Jefferson Davis, with whom she expects the secure life of a Mississippi landowner. Davis instead pursues a career in politics and is eventually appointed president of the Confederacy, placing Varina at the white-hot center of one of the darkest moments in American history --- culpable regardless of her intentions. The Confederacy falling, her marriage in tatters and the country divided, Varina and her children escape Richmond and travel south on their own, now fugitives with “bounties on their heads, an entire nation in pursuit.”

Set in a small town in North Carolina in the early 1960s, NIGHTWOODS tells of Luce, a young woman who inherits her murdered sister’s troubled twins. Before the children, Luce was content with her quiet life amidst the Appalachian landscape, choosing to live apart from the community around her. But the coming of her disturbed niece and nephew changes everything, cracking open her solitary life in difficult, hopeful and dangerous ways.

Wounded Confederate soldier Inman's trek across the disintegrating South brings him into converse with slaves and marauders, bounty hunters and witches, both helpful and malign. At the same time, Ada, the woman he loved years before and is trying to reach, is desperate to revive her father's derelict farm and learn to survive in a world where old certainties have been swept away.