With or Without Me is an unsparing and eloquent critique of religion. Yet Esther Maria Magnis’s ire is merely the beginning of an exceptional journey toward belief and God—a journey punctuated by personal losses retold with intense immediacy. “Maybe God is a sadist, ” she writes, “a big baby who had a terrible upbringing. If, as Christians claim, God is love, then it’s a kind of love I do not understand. ” She dares to believe anyway, although her questioning won’t let up. She fiercely dismantles both the clichéd phrases she’s heard in church and the vague progressive pieties of her parents’ generation.

Esther Maria Magnis knows believing in God is anything but easy. Because he allows people to suffer. Because he’s invisible. And silent. “I think we miss God, ” she writes, “I would never want to persuade anyone or put myself above atheists. I know there are good reasons not to believe. But sometimes I think most people are just sad that he’s not there. ”

With or Without Me is a book for everyone—believer or unbeliever, Christian or atheist—who refuses to surrender to the idea that, just because there can be beauty and truth, there must also be clear answers to the big questions in life.