The year is 1945, Claire Randall, a former combat nurse, is back from the war and reunited with her husband on a second honeymoon - when she walks through a standing stone in one of the ancient stone circles that dot the British Isles. Suddenly she is a Sassenach - an "outlander" - in a Scotland torn by war and raiding Highland clans in the year of our Lord...1743. Hurled back in time by forces she cannot understand, Claire is catapulted into intrigues...

Time-traveling Claire Randall returns to her own time, pregnant and weary, and resumes her life, but her memories of her eighteenth-century Scottish lover Jamie Fraser will not die, leading her to a desperate decision to return to him.

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...