Written with such powerful emotion, you can feel the fear and bewildering thoughts of the young Ali. How it was drummed into her, how she felt helpless like her life was chosen for her, without having a chance of how she may have wanted her life direction to go. 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. In this frightening, cloistered world, Ali grows older. As she does, she starts to question the ways of the Witnesses, and their control over the most intimate aspects of her life. As she marries and has a daughter within the religion, she finds herself pulled deeper and deeper into its dark undertow, her mind tormented by one question: is it possible to escape the life you are born into?

I knew very little about the Jehovah's Witness before I read this memoir. Ali Millar lays bare the the details of the the sect in a brave and profoundly moving way. She was born into the program as her mother had become a Witness before she was born, he mother uses it as a crutch and life is totally subsumed by the teachings.Little Ali Millar, sitting in the Kingdom Hall, listening to the Elders preach - Waiting for Armageddon. She is terrified about what she may see happen, it haunts her. She attends the Jehovah’s Witness meetings with her Mother and Sister. So much to learn, so much to get right. 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

I’d recommend this book to many to assist and support them in the healing process of leaving JW organisation if that is what they have decided to do. May Ali’s experiences resonate with others and assist in setting them free from a very unloving organisation. There is a great deal of hard-won, valuable wisdom here for the more heathen among us. The particularity of Millar’s experience is important, as is the particularity of any book or life is, but The Last Days is by no means exclusive to the Jehovah Witnesses, Christianity, or even religions generally. Instead, it is a warning against departing from objective material reality into any form of ideology or orthodoxy. As she does, she starts to question the ways of the Witnesses, and their control over the most intimate aspects of her life. 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.

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No-one "shuns" me. No-one is required to. We all co-exist without any shunning, harrssment or mention of it. 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 divine fear of Man is not.

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. 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. Millar added: "I’m absolutely delighted to be working with Robyn and the team at Ebury to bring The Last Days to life. It’s been incredible to work with Matthew at RCW who championed it tirelessly, making the telling of a sometimes difficult story easier. I feel hugely fortunate to have such a great team behind The Last Days and know the book will resonate with readers. It’s a book that means so much to me, I can’t wait to share it."It is a story of trauma, religious and intergenerational. Her entry into what can be described as a cult of its own – motherhood, forces Millar to make her final exit from the group: “I could have carried on lying to myself with that doubling, but as soon as you are responsible for someone else it changes, I couldn't inflict that upon her”. The story starts with her mother’s choice to join the Jehovah’s Witnesses and we close with her exit as a new mother, the breaking of intergenerational trauma guiding Millar’s story to a redemptive end. They are wrong about that. Because by now Millar has found within herself some talent they can’t take away. Something she can use to explain why she has broken away from the faith that sustained her mother through her own hard adult life bringing up two daughters on supplementary benefit, even though the cost of doing so is being disfellowshipped – ignored, cut off, shunned – by her mother as well as by all other Witnesses. She can come through the looking glass of organised religion and write a memoir as good, and as consistently gripping, as this. Millar was just nine months old when her mother (a former teacher) became one of the church’s 8.7 million members. She had been abandoned by the father of her five-year-old daughter, Zoe, and then by Ali’s dad (who turned out to have a wife and child elsewhere). The seductive lies of unreliable men had left her flailing and the church promised support, forgiveness and routine. The rug would never be pulled out from under her again because the business of the church was preparing believers for God’s ultimate, imminent rug pull. Jehovah’s Witnesses “don’t believe in heavenly hope”, explains Millar. Instead they believe that “Jehovah has anointed 144,000 humans to serve at His side for all eternity. Every­one who survives His ­coming judgment will live forever on earth.”