“This is an explosive exploration,” the reviewer for Inspire Magazine, John Woods, declares, of author Esther Maria Magnis’s loss of loved ones to cancer, who “then as a consequence,” has “her faith in God shattered….” The faithfictionfriends.blogspot.com critic agrees: “This is a journey that is often raw, angry, hopeful, searing, sacred, and profane—and often all at the same time. Magnis would come to cling to God even as she screamed at him [and] doubted his existence…. It’s not an easy story to read; but then it was an almost impossible story to live.”
Lydia Dugdale, author of The Lost Art of Dying, pictures the volume as, “Breathtakingly honest, with unflinching rawness,” and insists it’s “a must-read for anyone who has ever pondered the meaning of life.” The book’s publisher, Plough, points up Magnis’s “tortuous journey to faith”. As one reader puts it, the book “presents an unglossed account of one person’s path through suffering and doubt.”
A journalist and historian, Magnis wrote her intensely personal With or Without Me in German, her native language. The English translation, by Alta Price, is in itself notable: it captures brusquely her “tangled thoughts, desperate cries, and penetrating questions,” as Woods has it.
With or Without Me: A Memoir of Losing and Finding
By Esther Maria Magnis
Plough Publishing House, 2022
