Leaving the Witness: Exiting a Religion and Finding a Life

A third-generation Jehovah's Witness, Amber Scorah had devoted her life to sounding God's warning of impending Armageddon. She volunteered to take the message to China, where the preaching she did was illegal and could result in her expulsion or worse. There, for the first time, she had some distance form her community, and her immersion in a foreign culture - and a whole new way of thinking - eventually led her to abandon all that she had been sure was true.

Shunned by family and friends as an apostate, Scorah was alone in Shanghai and thrown into a world she had known only from the periphery. A coming-of-age story of a woman already in her thirties, Leaving the Witness follows Scorah to New York City and traces the bittersweet process of starting over, when everything one's life was built around is gone.