Eliza is faced with an impossible situation.  She is a widow with three children, has to unexpectedly take her husband's Aunt "Batty" into her home, and rescue a hobo on the verge of dying.  On top of all that, the bank is about to foreclose due to loans and gambling that her abusive, controlling jerk of a father-in-law left for her after his not so tragic death.  With only ninety days to find the money she needs, help comes from a most unexpected source.  Through Aunt Batty's surprising tale of her own youth at the end of the nineteenth century, Eliza finds the answers she needs, and also begins to wonder if her hobo is more connected to her than he admits.  Her father-in-law left the farm on which she lives to his wife's eldest son, Matthew, who disappeared in the First World War.  Is this stranger, Gabe, possibly him? Or is he the angel he appears to be?  As the months pass, he has become part of their family, and her motives for wanting to marry him change from greed and need, to just love.  Will his secrets unite them or drive them apart forever?  What about Eliza's own hidden past? Gabe and Aunt Batty are not the only ones with secrets.

Told largely in flashback, this is a difficult book to sum up with its four different plotlines interwoven as they are.  It portrays a hard, unforgiving era in our history, and is often bleak, though well written.  Aunt Batty is the best part of the whole thing. I imagined Shirley MacClaine, if she converted to Christianity, as portraying her in my mind.