This book is about ghosts and gods and flying saucers and certainty in the absence of knowledge.
From award-winning author Sarah Krasnostein comes an exploration of the power of belief. Weaving together the stories of six extraordinary ordinary people, The Believer looks at the stories we tell ourselves to deal with the distance between the world as it is, and the world as we'd like it to be. How they can stunt us – or save us.
Some of the people you will meet believe in things most people don't. Ghosts. UFOs. Heaven and the Devil. The literal creation of the universe in six days.
Others believe in things most people would like to. Dying with autonomy. Facing one's own transgressions with an open heart.
In this intensely personal and gorgeously written new book Krasnostein talks with her characteristic compassion and empathy to these believers – and finds out what happens when their beliefs crash into her own.
Sarah Krasnostein is a multi-award winning writer and critic. She is the best-selling author of The Trauma Cleaner, The Believer, the Quarterly Essay, Not Waving, Drowning, and On Peter Carey
The Trauma Cleaner is available in various translations. The Believer was named by The New Yorker as a Best Book of 2022.
She has won Walkley Awards for long form feature writing and arts criticism, and been awarded the Victorian Prize for Literature, the Australian Book Industry Award for General Non-Fiction, the Victorian Premier's Prize for Non-Fiction, the Prize for Non-Fiction at the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards and the Dobbie Literary Award. She was a finalist for the Wellcome Book Prize (UK), the National Biography Award, the Melbourne Prize for Literature, the Walkley Book Award and the Nib Literary Award. She holds a doctorate in criminal law and is admitted to legal practice in New York and Victoria.
'The Trauma Cleaner is a disturbing and fascinating read with a heavy, beating heart at its centre...[Krasnostein] shows how a writer can empathise and engage with a subject yet still paint a realistic portrait.' Australian on The Trauma Cleaner
