The Long Road Home (novel)

The Long Road Home was written by Danielle Steele and released in 1998.

Plot

Gabrielle child of the fifties suffers abuse from the hands of her mother. Frequent beatings mar her life. Before Gabby turns thirteen her father, tired of his wife's constant abuse towards their daughter, leaves.Gabby is then taken to a nunnery to finish out her education. While there, Gabby decides she wants to become a nun, but when she sleeps with a priest and becomes pregnant. She subsequently looses the baby and must leave the church. Incidentally the priest commits suicide.

Cast out into society, Gabby determines to move on and finds an apartment where the tenants welcome the young woman lovingly, particularly an old professor. Everything seems to be going well; Gabby has a job at a bakery, but loses it when she defends a child who's mother dislocates her arm in a fit of impatience.

Gabby also meets who she thinks is the perfect man but in reality is a con artists wanted for stealing money from different people. Constantly after Gabby to give him some money, she obliges, until the day he steals from her and later beats her up nearly killing her. Gabby is taken to the hospital, where the Doctor presiding over her falls in love with her.

Toward the end of the book Gabby visits her father hoping to get some answers on why he allowed her mother to treat her so horribly. Her father offers no answer except that he was weak. Gabby then visits her stepfather and his new wife where it is revealed her mother never changed her ways bitter to the end and even went so far as to verbally abuse her new husband until she died of cancer. Gabby and Peter eventually get married.