When Calls the Heart (Canadian West #1)

When Calls the Heart is a novel by the Canadian writer Janette Oke, published in 1983 as the first book of her Canadian West series. It is a Christian romance set on the Canadian frontier.

Elizabeth Thatcher comes from a comfortable family in the east and takes a teaching position in a small western town because she wants something more interesting than the life her family has planned for her. She is young, she is used to being looked after, and the town she arrives in is not especially interested in either fact.

The novel follows her through her first terms of teaching and through the friendships she makes among the people she meets, including a Mountie named Jake Thornton, whose interest in her develops over the course of the book. Most of the story is her experience of the place: what her pupils need, what the families expect, and how a woman from somewhere else learns to live in a community that cannot be talked round. It is the first of the Canadian West books.