In her long awaited new novel,<b> Drums of Autumn</b>, Diana Gabaldon continues the remarkable story of Claire and Jamie Fraser that began with the classic <b>Outlander</b>, and its bestselling sequels,<b> Dragonfly in Amber</b> and <b>Voyager.</b><br><br>Cast ashore in the American colonies, the Frasers are faced with a bleak choice: return to a Scotland fallen into famine and poverty, or seize the risky chance of a new life in the New World—menaced by Claire's certain knowledge of the coming Revolution.<br><br>Still, a highlander is born to risk—and so is a time-traveler. Their daughter, Brianna, is safe—they think—on the other side of a dangerous future; their lives are their own to venture as they will. With faith in themselves and in each other, they seek a new beginning among the exiled Scottish Highlanders of the Cape Fear, in the fertile river valleys of the Colony of North Carolina.<br><br>Even in the New World, though, the Frasers find their hope of peace threatened from without and within; by the British Crown and by Jamie's aunt, Jocasta MacKenzie, last of the MacKenzies of Leoch.<br><br>A hunger for freedom drives Jamie to a Highlander's only true refuge: the mountains. And here at last, with no challenge to their peace—save wild animals, Indians, and the threat of starvation—the Frasers establish a precarious foothold in the wilderness, secure in the knowledge that even war cannot invade their mountain sanctuary.<br><br>But history spares no one, and when Brianna follows her mother into the past, not even the mountains can shelter a Highlander. For Brianna too has an urgent quest: not only to find the mother she has lost and the father she has never met, but to save them both from a future that only she can see.