Then Came Heaven

The new romantic saga by the bestselling author of HOME SONG and SMALL TOWN GIRL.

Browerville is a small town in Minnesota, with a close, mostly Polish, community steeped in Catholicism. Everyone knows everyone else and looks out for each other’s children. And there Eddie and Krystyna Olczak have been bringing up their two little girls, Anne and Lucy, and living quiet but fulfilled, loving lives – Eddie is janitor at St Joseph’s church and school, Krystyna looks after their children and does voluntary work. Then tragedy strikes – Krystyna is killed by a train as she ill-judgedly drives across the track.

Everybody rallies round to help the bereaved family, including Irene, Krystyna’s plain and lonely sister – herself long in love with Eddie – and Sister Regina, one of Anne and Lucy’s teachers at the school. Regina had had a vocation to be a nun since she was a very young girl but now, in her early thirties, she is muddled and beginning to question whether she has done the right thing in renouncing the chance to have a husband and family in favour of a way of life she is coming to find increasingly unfulfilling.

Eddie is touched by the tact and concern of the nun towards his two bereft children, but, as committed Catholics, a chasm lies between them. It is a chasm both become overwhelmingly tempted to cross.