Summer has come to New England and Henry David Thoreau and his brother John are in love with the same girl. Reclusive writer Nathaniel Hawthorne is courting Sophia Peabody of the remarkable Peabody family of Boston. And the brilliant Margaret Fuller and equally brilliant but married Ralph Waldo Emerson find themselves engaged in a passionate affair of the mind and heart. Eventually, everyone--Henry, Margaret, the Emersons, the newlywed Hawthornes, and even the Alcotts (who have a daughter named Louisa May)--come together to live in the village of Concord. There, they experience times of joy and times of sorrow as they begin their journey toward becoming the extraordinary group that history remembers and readers revere. Now they are icons of American literature but in Concord they were young and in love.