Full of vivacity and hope, this touching and frequently humorous memoir traces the author’s path from highly religious childhood through loss of faith, drug abuse and recovery with rich insight and emotional honesty.
Waterstones Welsh Book of the Month for June 2023
Matt Rowland Hill grew up the son of a minister in an evangelical Christian church. It was a childhood fraught with bitter family conflict and the fear of damnation. After a devastating loss of faith in his late teens, Matt began his search for salvation elsewhere, eventually becoming addicted to crack and heroin - an ordeal that stretched over a decade and culminated in a period of hopeless darkness.
Recklessly honest, and as funny as it is grave, Original Sins is an extraordinary memoir of faith, family, shame and addiction. It's about looking for answers to life's big questions in all the wrong places, how hope can arrive in the most unexpected forms, and how the stories we tell might help us survive.
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
ISBN: 9781529113174
Number of pages: 320
Weight: 259 g
Dimensions: 197 x 130 x 20 mm
Electric...artfully structured...with novelistic verve... Hill is a blazing talent - Anthony Cummins, Observer
His remarkable, funny, arrestingly well-written memoir brings to mind Edward St Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, but is also entirely, exhilaratingly its own thing - The Times
A beautifully controlled tale of a life spiralling out of control...Original Sins is one of the best books I've read this year, full of vivacity and honesty...To carve such an entertaining and beautifully paced story from such depths of misery suggests a writer of immense gifts - Johanna Thomas-Corr, Sunday Times
This book is brilliant. The writing shimmers off the page - Kathryn Hughes, Guardian
[Hill] deploys dark wit and needle-sharp insight to describe how he swapped a love of Jesus for a love of class-A drugs... devastatingly good... I was blown away - Daily Telegraph
Given the subject matter, this book was remarkably easy to read. The prose is fluid, engaging and candid. I liked the brutal honesty, the humour and the questioning nature of the book. Do not skip reading the... More
Original Sins is by far the best book I’ve read this year and probably the best memoir ever written. In a sea of memoirs that end up preaching to the reader how to live, Matt Rowland Hill opens a space for a truly... More
BOOK REVIEW OF ORIGINAL SINS- A MEMOIR BY MATT ROWLAND HILL
“Is there anything more lovely than the sight of clean works, fresh from the pharmacy in the morning?”
This first sentence of Matt Rowland Hill’s debut...
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