WINNER OF THE 2017 COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD In the vein of Bad Blood & Why be Happy when you can be Normal? an enthralling at times shocking & deeply personal family memoir of growing up in & breaking away from a fundamentalist Christian cult At university when I made new friends & confidantes I couldn't explain how I'd become a teenage mother or shoplifted books for years or why I was afraid of the dark & had a compulsion to rescue people without explaining about the Brethren or the God they made for us & the Rapture they told us was coming But then I couldn't really begin to talk about the Brethren without explaining about my father' As Rebecca Stott's father lay dying he begged her to help him write the memoir he had been struggling with for years He wanted to tell the story of their family who for generations had all been members of a fundamentalist Christian sect Yet each time he reached a certain point he became tangled in a thicket of painful memories & could not go on The sect were a closed community who believed the world is ruled by Satan non-sect books were banned women were made to wear headscarves & those who disobeyed the rules were punished Rebecca was born into the sect yet as an intelligent inquiring child she was always asking dangerous questions She would discover that her father an influential preacher had been asking them too & that the fault-line between faith & doubt had almost engulfed him In In the Days of Rain Rebecca gathers the broken threads of her father's story & her own & follows him into the thicket to tell of her family's experiences within the sect & the decades-long aftermath of their breaking away