Chances are very good that within five years someone close to you will have become a "Mormon," a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which adds a million converts every three years.

An audacious claim? Try this one:

Members of the Church will tell you exactly what God looks like, where he lives, what he wears. They can even describe his voice. Furthermore, they can tell you where you came from, why you're here on earth, and where you're likely to go after death.

This is the story of the Latter-day Saints, the story of when God came back to earth and started things over. In person.

It may be the most confident message of God in centuries.

Written with the non-Latter-day-Saint reader firmly in mind, yet free of proselytory pretense, Latter Days explores an utterly unique catalog of Christian doctrine regarding the purpose of human existence and destiny. It presents the Mormon story of the creation of the world and lays out what Mormons believe is the divine plan for mankind, from Adam to Noah to Christ to Joseph Smith to Brigham Young. It relates the astonishing story of their great Exodus, as they were driven from the supposedly civilized United States to the wilderness of the Salt Lake-- a truly remarkable story that most of us were not taught in our high school history books.

Latter Days reveals what may well be at once the most unique, the most misunderstood, and the most generous concept of Christian salvation ever developed. Coke Newell goes inside the very mind and heart of the faith, and does so from the perspective of an author/convert whose life has taken him from being a hippie in the Colorado Rockies to the inner sanctum of the faith in Salt Lake City, where he works as an international public-affairs officer at the Church's headquarters.

Come, take a guided tour through the mind of Mormonism.

A convert to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in his late teens, Coke Newell graduated from the journalism program at Colorado State University. A media spokesman for the LDS Church in Salt Lake City, Utah, for most of a decade, he has authored or contributed to a number of books and periodicals and has been quoted extensively on Church policy, history, and doctrine. He is a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) and the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), and a biographee in Marquis's Who's Who in America. He lives with his wife, Cindy, and their children in northern Utah.