My Hard Life Lived Well: Volume 5

By K Alexander Kardos

Some lives are too big for one book. This is the last chapter of one that took five.

In My Hard Life Lived Well, Volume 5, Maria "Mary" Banfi Kardos closes out her remarkable memoir -- from a communist farm village in Slovenia, through a refugee camp in Austria, to a hard-won American life built with her husband, Karl, and their five children in Willoughby Hills, Ohio.

This final volume picks up in 1970, as a new baby daughter arrives and reawakens a family already stretched thin by teenage daughters, growing sons, and the relentless work of building something from nothing. Mary and Karl finally have the means -- and the courage -- to plan the trip of a lifetime: a return to the Europe they fled, and the family they left behind in Slovenia and Yugoslavia decades earlier.

But 1972 has one more test in store. Just as the family reaches its hard-earned "good life," an unexpected and shocking event changes everything Mary thought she knew about her future.

Told with unflinching honesty and deep faith, and co-written in her final years with her son after his own life-altering stroke, this volume is both a homecoming and a reckoning -- a mother's last gift to the children and grandchildren who carry her story forward.

If you've followed Mary's journey from Volume 1, this is the ending she earned. If you're meeting her for the first time, prepare to be moved.

Continue the journey -- read Volume 5 today.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0GYQCMHNQ
• ISBN13: 9798898384449
• Release Date: March 2026
• Publisher: Christian Faith Publishing
• Length: 306 Pages
• Weight: 1.22 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.0" x 9.0"