-
Get a Free Issue
of our Ezine!
Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life
by Amber Scorah
A riveting memoir of losing faith and finding freedom while a covert missionary in one of the world's most restrictive countries.
A third-generation Jehovah's Witness, Amber Scorah had devoted her life to sounding God's warning of impending Armageddon. She volunteered to take the message to China, where the preaching she did was illegal and could result in her expulsion or worse. Here, she had some distance from her community for the first time. Immersion in a foreign language and culture--and a whole new way of thinking--turned her world upside down, and eventually led her to lose all that she had been sure was true.
As a proselytizer in Shanghai, using fake names and secret codes to evade the authorities' notice, Scorah discreetly looked for targets in public parks and stores. To support herself, she found work at a Chinese language learning podcast, hiding her real purpose from her coworkers. Now with a creative outlet, getting to know worldly people for the first time, she began to understand that there were other ways of seeing the world and living a fulfilling life. When one of these relationships became an "escape hatch," Scorah's loss of faith culminated in her own personal apocalypse, the only kind of ending possible for a Jehovah's Witness.
Shunned by family and friends as an apostate, Scorah was alone in Shanghai and thrown into a world she had only known from the periphery--with no education or support system. A coming of age story of a woman already in her thirties, this unforgettable memoir examines what it's like to start one's life over again with an entirely new identity. It follows Scorah to New York City, where a personal tragedy forces her to look for new ways to find meaning in the absence of religion. With compelling, spare prose, Leaving the Witness traces the bittersweet process of starting over, when everything one's life was built around is gone.
"Scorah's prose is straightforward, and she has a winning sense of humor...her accounts of expat life and leaving her faith should give this candid memoir wide appeal." - Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"An intriguing read about a mysterious religion...an eye-opening account of how Jehovah's Witnesses live and operate." - Kirkus Reviews
"Amber Scorah navigates her escape with courage, clarity, and humor. She is a strikingly beautiful writer with the unique perspective and fresh sight that can only belong to an outsider." - Lisa Brennan-Jobs, author of Small Fry
"Amber Scorah's perfectly paced and sharply-written memoir opened my eyes to inner and outer worlds I'd placed in my periphery...She shares her guts, her intelligent doubt, her pain, and forgives and allows it in her reader...This is a book for the fearful and the brave." - Leanne Shapton, author of Swimming Studies
This information about Leaving the Witness was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Amber Scorah is a writer living in Brooklyn, NY. She works as an editor at Scholastic and her articles have been published in The New York Times, and The Believer. Prior to coming to New York, Scorah lived in Shanghai, where she was creator and host of the wildly popular podcast Dear Amber - The Insider's Guide to Everything China. This is her first book.
Pony Confidential
by Christina Lynch
In this whimsical mystery, a grumpy pony must clear his beloved human's name from a murder accusation.
.png)
Knowledge is of two kinds. We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information on it.
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
Your guide toexceptional books
BookBrowse seeks out and recommends the best in contemporary fiction and nonfiction—books that not only engage and entertain but also deepen our understanding of ourselves and the world around us.
