The story of Outlander begins just after the Second World War, when a British field nurse named Claire Randall walks through a cleft stone in the Scottish highlands and is transported back some two hundred years to 1743. Here, now, is The Fiery Cross, the eagerly awaited fifth volume in this remarkable, award-winning series of historical novels. The year is 1771, and war is approaching. Jamie Fraser's wife has told him so. Little as he wishes to, he must believe it, for hers is a gift of dreadful prophecy - a time-traveler's certain knowledge. To break his oath to the Crown will brand him a traitor; to keep it is certain doom. Jamie Fraser stands in the shadow of the fiery cross - a standard that leads nowhere but to the bloody brink of war. In 1771, Scotman Jamie Fraser and his twentieth-century time-traveler wife, Claire Randall, become caught between a loyalty to the Crown and the changing times, as the American Revolution draws inevitably closer, in a new volume from the Outlander saga.