City of Tranquil Light: A Novel

What ardent dazzling souls emerge from these American missionaries in China . . . A beautiful searing book that leaves an indelible presence in the mind. ―Patricia Hampl author of The Florists Daughter . Will Kiehn is seemingly destined for life as a humble farmer in the Midwest when having felt a call from God he travels to the vast North China Plain in the early twentieth-century. There he is surprised by love and weds a strong and determined fellow missionary Katherine. They soon find themselves witnesses to the crumbling of a more than two-thousand-year-old dynasty that plunges the country into decades of civil war. As the couple works to improve the lives of the people of Kuang Ping Cheng― City of Tranquil Light a place they come to love―and face incredible hardship will their faith and relationship be enough to sustain them? . Told through Will and Katherines alternating viewpoints―and inspired by the lives of the authors maternal grandparents―City of Tranquil Light is a tender and elegiac portrait of a young marriage set against the backdrop of the shifting face of a beautiful but torn nation. A deeply spiritual book it shows how those who work to teach others often have the most to learn and is further evidence that Bo Caldwell writes vividly and with great historical perspective (San Jose Mercury News).