While on vacation in Scotland, Clare touches an ancient stone circle and is hurled back in time 200 years, to 1743.

After cheating the hangman twice--once after the Battle of Culloden in Scotland and again at Marshalsea Prison--Jamie MacGillivray is sentenced to indentured servitude in colonial America where he teams up with a poor village girl similarly sentenced through serfdom, revolt, escape, and romantic entanglements.

For twenty years Claire Randall has kept her secrets. But now she is returning with her grown daughter to Scotland's majestic mist-shrouded hills. Here Claire plans to reveal a truth as stunning as the events that gave it birth: about the mystery of an ancient circle of standing stones, about a love that transcends the boundaries of time, and about James Fraser, a Scottish warrior whose gallantry once drew a young Claire from the security of her century...