Joe Clay is a top-notch public relations man. Anything a client wants Joe can arrange for them, whether it be dancing girls or an article in a prominent magazine. Part of the job however is drinking and Joe's ability to consume alcohol seems boundless. When he meets the very pretty Kirsten Arnasen, she prefers chocolate to alcohol but Joe has a solution to that in the form of a Brandy Alexander (made up of brandy and creme de cocoa). They eventually marry but their love is insufficient to prevent them from the downward spiral that alcohol brings to them. They try desperately to break the habit but continually relapse until only one of them manages to break free.

Dr. Robert Richardson, a dedicated young general practitioner, seeks to establish himself in an isolated fishing village on Cape Breton Island off the Nova Scotia coast. The population is poor and the struggling physician generally gets paid for his efforts in barter. When he meets Belinda McDonald, a young deaf mute callously dismissed by family and neighbors as "the dummy," he alone senses her innate intelligence. He overcomes the initial skepticism of her flinty, gruff father and indifferently cold aunt, who operate a hardscrabble grist mill and farm, and devotes himself to teaching the young girl sign language and lip-reading. Hopes are even raised that she might even eventually qualify for a medical procedure that might improve her condition. Her optimism is crushed, however, when she raped by Locky McCormick, a brutish local fisherman. Traumatized, she is unable to communicate the outrage to her family...

Beautiful half-breed Pearl Chavez becomes the ward of her dead father's first love and finds herself torn between her sons, one good and the other bad.

Clipper ships taking the shortest route between the Mississippi and the Atlantic often end up on the shoals of Key West in the 1840s...