Fields Of Home Books in Order

The Fields of Home trilogy is one of Jerry Eicher's strongest homecoming stories. It begins with an Amish woman leaving, not staying. That choice changes the feel of the whole series. Instead of starting inside a settled community, the books begin with distance, uncertainty, and the question of whether going home is really possible.

In Missing Your Smile, Susan Hostetler breaks with her boyfriend Thomas Stoll and leaves her Amish life behind for Asbury Park. There she learns to drive, studies for her GED, and starts building an English future. Eicher does not treat that move as simple rebellion. Susan is curious, wounded, and determined, but also more tied to home than she wants to admit.

The turning point comes through Teresa Long, a pregnant young English woman who asks Susan for help arranging an Amish adoption. Teresa is important because she becomes the second emotional center of the trilogy. Her presence keeps the books from becoming only Susan's story. Through Teresa, the series starts asking whether Amish life can be chosen from the outside, and what the community is willing to make room for.

That question drives Following Your Heart. Susan returns home with Teresa and Teresa's baby, Samuel. Teresa hopes to settle among the Amish, but the church does not simply fold her into its embrace. There are rules, suspicions, and hard lines about what repentance and belonging ought to look like. Susan, meanwhile, is still caught between old ties and the freedom she tasted away from home.

In Where Love Grows, the two strands come together. Teresa moves closer to the life she wants, while Susan must face her past with Thomas just as another man enters the picture. The family story also deepens as Susan's father, Menno Hostetler, is forced to reckon with a hidden sin that has shadowed the household for years.

This series is less about idealized Amish calm and more about crossing boundaries, then living with the cost. It has a tender core, but it also pays attention to church discipline, shame, forgiveness, and the way one person's return can unsettle an entire family. If you like Eicher at his best when he is writing about belonging, Fields of Home is a very solid choice.