Leisha Kelly

Julia Wortham, counting herself blessed to have been given a farm on which to live with her husband Samuel and two children during the Great Depression, finds her faith tested when her brother-in-law, just out of prison, shows up at their home with a child he claims was fathered by Samuel.

In Leisha Kelly's well-received novel, Julia's Hope, Samuel and Julia Wortham and their two children charmed readers as they found shelter in the home-and heart-of a grandmotherly woman named Emma Graham. Now, in Emma's Gift, the Wortham family is struck down by the deaths of two close friends, including their neighbor Wilametta Hammond, just days before Christmas 1931. Wila is the mother of ten children and the glue that holds the family together....

The Worthams and Hammonds are as close as two families could be, sharing almost everything on their Depression-era Illinois farms. So when a raging fire breaks out and threatens to destroy the Hammond farm, both families are affected by the tragedy. But how did the fire start? Several of the kids know the truth, but no one is talking. As the families try to overcome aching loss, misplaced blame, troubled relationships, and an upsetting secret, they...