Amish Fiction

Siblings Martin, Kelsey, Beth, and Jonny are as different as can be, but they have one thing in common. They're all longing to reinvent their lives. Raised by their divorced lapsed-Amish father and English mother, they only knew real stability and a sense of family when visiting their Old Order grandparents, Josiah and Sylvia Schrock, in peaceful small-town Millersburg, Ohio. Now, the four want to try living with them and joining their faith—much to the Schrocks' surprise.

Recently widowed after twenty years of marriage, Frances Lehman is only just tasting the freedom and opportunity that her Promise Lodge friends enjoy. So she's not about to be pressured into marriage by her widowed brother-in-law, even if she and her daughter have no real means of support. Much more promising is her new friendship with Preacher Marlin Kurtz, though their respective families don't see their relationship as proper.

Three charming stories of new school years and new romance.

It’s been four years since Jennie’s husband died in a farming accident. Long enough that the elders in her Amish community think it’s time to marry again for the sake of her seven children. What they don’t know is that grief isn’t holding her back from a new relationship. Fear is. A terrible secret in her past keeps her from moving forward.

Sweet Naomi Byler cooks meals for the guests at The Peony Inn, where Amish sisters and owners of the inn Esther and Lizzie love her like a granddaughter. She’s as happy there as a young woman can be, considering that her fiancé, Thomas, has left her to court someone else. She knows she’ll get over the love of her life in due time, but she is beginning to assume marriage will never be a part of her future.

Overwhelmed by grief and tending twin baby daughters, Rosmanda Lapp is without options. She still blames her brother-in-law, Levi, for her husband’s accidental death - but she and her aging in-laws need him to keep their farm going. Yet as Levi takes on his responsibilities with a new determination and steadiness, she can’t help but regret that she chose his serious-minded brother over him. For Levi is still very much the passionate man she loved - and Rosmanda now has even more reasons to keep him at arm’s length....

Jack Livingston has been raising his nine-year-old adopted niece, Natalie, since the accident that took her parents' lives. While he travels for work, Natalie is lovingly cared for by Laura, an Amish nanny who loves her as her own. Kelly Maines is nearing the end of her rope. Her baby was kidnapped, the apparent victim of a black market adoption ring, and for eight years, Kelly has tirelessly pursued every lead to its bitter end. Now, there's one last lead from a private investigator: Just a few miles away lives a girl who matches the profile....

May Schott would do anything to change the tragic moment when she stepped too close to the fire that left her best friend, Carl Hilty, devastatingly burned. After Carl left Apple Creek for extensive surgeries, May patiently prayed for one chance to ask his forgiveness. Now, six years later, Carl Hilty is coming home. The reunion goes nothing like May anticipated. Overwhelmed with emotion at seeing Carl again, she is speechless, unable to look away. And Carl's own stone-cold silence leaves her certain that whatever attraction they once shared has been replaced by his hatred of her.

For years, Edna Miller has found herself drawn to Emery Hoschtettler with an attraction she can explain no better than she can put a stop to it. Other suitors come and go, but none make her feel the way she feels around Emery - that incredible floating feeling, as if she was walking on air, mixed with a painful desperation to be ever nearer to him. Despite the fact that Emery seldom seems to pay her much attention, she decides it would be unfair to marry anyone else when her heart longs only for him. He hasn’t seriously dated anyone else either.

Along with his volunteer work at the local fire department, running his Amish farm keeps Jamie Riehl busy. He barely has time to eat at the family table, never mind find someone to date. But when he meets Kayla Dienner, he is smitten. Kayla tries hard to deny her attraction to Jamie. After all, she's spent the last year discouraging her younger brother, Nathan, from becoming a firefighter. The death of their older brother in a fire a year ago is fresh in her mind - she can't bear the idea of putting her heart on the line every time the sirens blare.

Life is good on their Pennsylvania Amish farm for newlyweds Vic and Eleanor Lapp—until the day Vic's youngest brother drowns in their pond and Vic turns to alcohol to numb the pain. Things get so bad that Vic loses his job and their marriage is coming apart. Eleanor is desperate to help her husband and writes letters to her friend, Doretta, living in Indiana, for advice. The trust Eleanor places in her friend and the gentle words she receives in return are a balm for even darker days to come.

When Ettie and her sister Elsa-May pick up the baby left at their door, a letter falls to the ground. The letter pleads with them to keep quiet about the infant as his life is in danger. When retired Detective Crowley stumbles onto their secret, is it already too late?

Though Cassie Coblenz left her Amish community to go to college, her mother and father's farm will always feel like home. It's the ideal place for an extended study break - at least until her grandmother's handsome Englisch doctor becomes a regular distraction. Zach Reynolds is the kind of heartbreaker Cassie has learned to avoid, no matter how charming he may be.

In "No Place Like Home", widow Eva Dienner returns home to meet the man her parents always intended for her. After Hurricane Harvey, Sarah Hook returns to the home she fled and back into the arms of Abram King in "When Love Returns". In "The Courage to Stay", Irene Keim seeks a fresh start in the home of her new friends, but when their son comes around, he's determined to push her out. Atlee Shetler is visiting Birch Breek to escape the memories of his late wife and finds the project of renovating a bakery and its owner much more than he's bargained for in "What Love Built".

Newlywed Chief of Police Kate Burkholder is awakened by an urgent midnight call summoning her to a suspicious fire in the woods. When she arrives at the scene, she discovers a charred body. According to the coroner, the deceased, an Amish man named Milan Swanz, was chained to a stake and burned alive. It is an appalling and eerily symbolic crime against an upstanding husband and father.

Maisy never expected that a Plain girl like her could have her heart stolen by an Englisch boy. But when her rumspringa ends and Maisy realizes she’s pregnant, the reality of their choices—and their differences—sets in. Maisy knows she will never leave her faith to marry her baby's father. But she also knows the road to acceptance as an unwed mother in an Amish community will be long and hard. To protect her family from the scandal, she goes to live with her cousin in Haven, Kansas, where she will have some solitude to figure out what kind of future she might have.

Ruby Weaver's curly red hair isn't the only thing that sets her apart from her Amish community in 1863. Twenty-eight and single, Ruby doesn't believe a woman needs to be married in order to be happy. Her ailing friend Lovinia Fischer, however, has other ideas and wants Ruby to promise to marry her husband after she dies. Never imagining she'd have to fulfill that vow, Ruby agrees. And she's not the only one. Lovinia has extracted a similar promise from her husband, Gideon.

Now that her friends are all marrying or moving away, Heart Beachy has started feeling lonely. Worse, everyone keeps asking when she's going to find a man of her own. Don't they realize Heart has her hands full at home with her widowed dad, too many chores, and a menagerie of needy, small animals? Besides, she doesn't understand the fuss about marriage. It's enough to make her consider finally becoming a pet-sitter, or moving to an English community, where she won't be an oddity . . .

Just an innocent bet. Okay, well, maybe a bet to rob the three most virtuous girls in town of their purity isn't exactly innocent, but there's no way we could have known how it would all turn out. How much trouble it would bring. But what the hell were an Amish girl and her sisters doing in the middle of Bright Falls, anyway? I mean, it seemed almost too easy. She was a sheep and I was the wolf, and it was time for me to feast.

Aaron Coblentz has a secret: he’s been studying to take the GED. But he can’t let his Amish family know, not when his older brother already left the faith just a year after getting baptized, practically crippling the family. When Aaron asks bookmobile librarian Sarah Anne Miller for additional study guides, she arranges for Kayla Kaufman to be his tutor. Kayla has a secret, too. Her mother’s death propelled her father into a constant state of depression, and unable to deal with his erratic behavior, her longtime boyfriend has broken things off. But she hasn’t given up on love.