By Philip Yancey

Philip Yancey has written a score of brilliant, best-selling books. Billy Graham called him the world’s best living Christian author. I have been a huge fan of his writing.

This is his memoir. It is a tough book. An incredibly sad story in so many ways. The memoir focuses on his childhood through college, and afterwards, on his older brother Marshall and his mother.

His dad died of polio when Yancey was an infant. His impoverished mother remains single and tries to raise her two sons as a Bible teacher in the Atlanta area. They forever struggle with money. Mostly live in a small trailer home. They attend fundamentalist and racist Baptist churches. Their mother is angry, self-righteous, verbally abusive and hypocritical. She inflicts deep wounds on her two sons. The oldest, Marshall, never recovers. That Philip Yancey became an influential Christian writer, the most influential of his day, is a gift of grace.

The memoir is searingly honest, vulnerable, transparent. That’s Yancey.

He takes us through the pain of his childhood, the ungrace of the fundamentalist churches, his doubts and wanderings during his years at a legalistic Bible college, the brilliance of his gifted older brother, the incredibly sad life of that tormented, unforgiving, wounded brother (he hasn’t spoken to his mother in 50 years), Yancey meeting his future wife in his college years and falling deeply in love (they’ve been married now for 50 years), and God’s grace in his life, revealing his love and mercy.

One reviewer says: This “could be a Faulkner novel, with racist preachers, off-kilter parenting, tormented siblings, and religious hypocrisy right and left.”

Another: This “is a stunning memoir – beautifully written, transparent and vulnerable, raw and honest, evocative and unforgettable. It is the book Philip Yancey had to write, and the book we needed him to write.”