Millar emerges, both true to her younger self, and transformed. You feel the weight, pain and melancholy when she writes to her mother: ‘ My seditious little heart; I knew then, didn’t I, that one day you’d want to burn my book too.’ The Last Days is proof that those who wish can burn all the books in existence but can never destroy the thoughts behind them and the independence of their ideas. They can deny but not erase what is real. ‘Ye shall know the truth,’ it is written in John 8:32 ‘and the truth shall make you free’. The Last Days will tell the story of Millar’s coming-of-age in the religious sect, exploring her journey through the faith and the complex relationships it createdwith her mother and, later, her husband and children. A true tale with names changed of girl Ali now a Lady who grew up with a Mum a sister and the JW's, I'm guessing not many of them will read this but we'll I will let you make your mind up. There is a truth with an honesty rarely seen in these sort of accounts our Heroine Ali makes no secret of her faults or are they her human nature. When searching for something you look everywhere if your honest and this feels very honest. I'm a Christian not a JW I hate religion and the way it destroyed lives. To love is divin If anyone can understand where the author is coming from, it's me - I also grew up as a JW, finally leaving in my late teens. A lot of the things detailed are absolutely true; JWs do not celebrate birthdays or Christmas, you are encouraged to keep away from 'worldly people', women are definitely considered second class but it's wrapped up in the language of being a "complement" to man, & having a career/going to university is a no-no.. From my early teens I chafed against the expectations & I had questions about the teachings I was not allowed to ask, & upon leaving I felt exactly like Nicole Kidman looks in that photograph of her shortly after divorcing Tom Cruise - freedom.

It is 1982 and in the Kingdom Hall we are Jehovah's Witnesses. The state of the world shows us the end is close, and Satan is like a roaring lion, seeking to devour us. Growing up as a Jehovah's Witness and leaving the community when I was 14, I have struggled to find memoirs, if any, that portray the inside of the community as it really is. Most people view Witnesses as quiet but strange with their stances on refusing blood transfusions and not celebrating birthdays and Christmas, but not many people understand the abuse and trauma you can go through when you are a member as well as when you leave.As an ex-Witness I found this book about being a Jehovah’s Witness, and then leaving, incredibly moving. I sometimes think books like this can’t be fully appreciated by anyone else other than ex-Witnesses, seeing as it’s such a peculiarly cultural thing. Published tomorrow by Ebury, July Book of the Month is Ali Millar’s ‘The Last Days’, a memoir about growing up in, and then escaping, the Jehovah’s Witnesses. It is a dam-burst of a book, writes Darran Anderson, which marks the emergence of a major writer. Both my parents were convinced and lifelong Christian Scientists, another (let’s be kind) esoteric American religion. They didn’t believe in doctors, medicine, hospitals: all you had to do if you fell ill was to ‘know the truth’ – that because you were created in the image and likeness of God, and because God is perfect, you couldn’t possibly have cancer, a dodgy heart or whatever ailed you at the time. Every Wednesday evening, they held ‘testimony meetings’ which mainly consisted of members of the congregation standing up and recounting how they’d done just that.

I loved many of my JW friends as most are very nice people. However, they are so caught up in this hypocritical organisation that I’m well aware I could not say anything negative about JW ORG to them.

But my experiences aren’t relevant here, Ali Millars’s are and she writes them so beautifully. It is incredible how she manages to capture the spirit of whatever age she is and imbue that into those chapters so that you’d be forgiven for thinking that she was copying from a childhood log book. Her growing maturity matches the maturity of the storytelling until by the end it is elegiac and fully grown.

Yet when I read Millar’s memoir, I soon realised that the small similarities with my own childhood were drowned out by the howling differences. By the time I put it down, I was positively raging on her behalf at the way she was treated by the elders of her congregation, interrogated in her home about her sex life as if by seventeenth century witch hunters. Just as damnably, their religion has cut her off, perhaps forever, from her mother’s love – to which her book is a kind of memorial. So when it comes to being dragged along as a child to ultra-nonconformist worship, I’ve got form. I’ve seen too how it can give a purpose in life to decent people who have been let down by the world, who want help to cope with fear or pain and who aren’t given to questioning. The difference between Millar and me is that, as soon as I could think for myself, I was embarrassed by my parents’ very real and unswerving faith and – to their enormous credit – they didn’t stand in my way when, as a 12-year-old, I stopped being a Christian Scientist. Truth to tell, I was never much of one to begin with.

Retailers:

A lyrical and powerful memoir of leaving the Jehovah's Witnesses, from an exciting new literary talent. Anorexia became a form of penance. She mortified her flesh until it turned a translucent blue – she felt “angelic”. Starvation made wings of her shoulder blades. At 16, she was hospitalised, but recovered and eventually returned to the faith (marrying and attempting to serve as a submissive wife and mother), before her epiphany in that lavatory. Cult-like entrapment and myopia isn’t unique to religious faith, and indeed some of the most perilous contemporary forms of groupthink appear to come in secular forms. ‘To keep the congregation clean, we disfellowship unrepentant wrongdoers,’ Millar writes ‘taking care not to associate with them afterwards. This is an act of love.’ It is a form of punitive benevolence that is all too recognisable in our age. These echoes make The Last Days a chilling read at times, particularly when Millar touches on how the road to hell may be paved by good intentions. ‘These are the beliefs you said would save my life and neither of us knew, not then, what they would do to us.’ I think Ali Millar comes very close in this memoir, identifying the emotions many of us go through at different times, the absolute inner-turmoil of conflict that only ever fades but never goes away after leaving. And there is no one really to blame except the faceless organisation itself, since Witness sincerity is actually a thing, their self-delusion another. In the end those of us fortunate enough to have left sport a lifestyle-hole that cannot be truly filled, banished by those who only know conditional love, something Ali points out towards the end.