The second book by the bestselling, award-winning author of The Trauma Cleaner. With her trademark compassion, observational rigour and unique humanity, Sarah Krasnostein takes us into the lives of people who believe in something extraordinary, despite the odds.

This book is about ghosts and gods and flying saucers; certainty in the absence of knowledge; how the stories we tell ourselves to deal with the distance between the world as it is and as we’d like it to be can stunt us or save us.

From award-winning author Sarah Krasnostein comes an exploration of the power of belief.

What do we believe?
Who do we believe?
Why do we believe?

Sarah Krasnostein spent the last four years in Australia and the US talking to some extraordinary people-people holding fast to belief, even as it rubs against the grain of more accepted realities. Some of them believe in things most people don’t. Ghosts. UFOs. Heaven and the Devil. The literal creation of the universe in six days. Some of them believe in things most people would like to. Dying with autonomy. Spending half your life in prison for protecting your child and yet still believing in a just God.

In this intensely personal and gorgeously written new book Krasnostein, the bestselling, multi-award-winning author of The Trauma Cleaner, talks with her trademark compassion and empathy to these believers-and finds out what happens when their beliefs crash into her own.

Sarah Krasnostein is a writer. She is admitted to legal practice in Australia and America, and holds a doctorate in criminal law. She is the best-selling author of The Trauma Cleaner, which won the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Victorian Premier’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Australian Book Industry Award for Non-Fiction and the Dobbie Literary Award. It jointly won the Douglas Stewart Prize for Non-Fiction at the NSW Premier’s Literary Awards, was longlisted for the Walkley Book Award and was shortlisted for the National Biography Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature and the Wellcome Book Prize (UK). Her work has appeared in a variety of publications and academic journals in Australia, the UK and America.