Tender Victory: A Novel (English Edition)

New York Times Bestseller: The touching and effective story of an American minister who returns home from WWII with five orphaned Holocaust survivors (The New York Times). Rev. Johnny Fletcher serves wounded soldiers from the battlefield as a military chaplain during World War II. His forté is spiritual solace in the darkest of times, but his life changes when he performs a public heroic act: facing down an angry mob intent on attacking five young Holocaust survivors. Upon learning they have no homes or families to return to, Fletcher decides to bring them to America. To his dismay, his coal-mining community of Barryfield, Pennsylvania, greets this makeshift family with prejudice and distrust. Beneath the towns placid surface run buried religious divisions. Fletchers 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 Barryfields most powerful figure, Fletcher must try to awaken the townspeople to the better angels of their nature before its too late.