It's generally fiction that we send out to subscribers but every now and again a work of narrative non-fiction crosses our desk and we become utterly absorbed, moved and ultimately changed by it. This month's selection The Believer: Encounters with Love, Death & Faith did all of those things and more and we are so very excited to be sending it out to our community.
This is author Sarah Krasnostein's second book. Her first, The Trauma Cleaner, won the hearts and minds of booksellers, readers and award judges alike when it published in 2017 and cemented Krasnostein as an author of enormous intelligence and empathy. The Believer proves that this writer has been finessing her craft. Exploring six "extraordinary ordinary people", the book is a deep dive into the power of belief. There are death doulas, creation scientists and paranormal believers in the mix, but as an early review in The Sydney Morning Herald remarked, Krasnostein is "tender with stories at which the righteous might scoff... she is an existential adventurer".
The result is transcendent, expansive writing that does the thing that many writers strive for but only few achieve: to show us humanity in clear and compassionate detail, to deepen our understanding of it and to reveal the mysterious and myriad ways in which we are all connected. It is nothing short of astounding!
A few links if you want to go deeper...
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