New York TimesBestseller: The "touching and effective" story of an American minister who returns home from WWII with five orphaned Holocaust survivors (The New York Times).
To his dismay, his coal-mining community of Barryfield, Pennsylvania, greets this makeshift family with prejudice and distrust. Beneath the town's placid surface run buried religious divisions. Fletcher's commitment to raising the children according to their individual faithstwo Protestant, two Catholic, and one Jewishmeets with horrific levels of intolerance. Dealing with such prejudice turns more sinister still when a local newspaper publisher cynically uses the story for his own purposes.
Together with Lorry Summerfield, the beautiful, disillusioned daughter of Barryfield's most powerful figure, Fletcher must try to awaken the townspeople to the better angels of their nature before it's too late.