Original Sins: An extraordinary memoir of faith, family, shame and addiction
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Summary
'A stunningly well-written, funny, heartrending and utterly gripping memoir about learning how to live with who we are. Read it. Read it now' Nathan Filer
Matt Rowland Hill grew up the son of a minister in an evangelical Christian church in south Wales and then south-east England. 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, turning to books before developing a growing relationship with alcohol and drugs. He became addicted to crack and heroin in his early twenties, 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. But ultimately it is 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.
'I tore through this brilliant, fearless book. From the first page to the last, it's funny, insightful and beautifully written' Joe Dunthorne
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'A stunningly well-written, funny, heartrending and utterly gripping memoir about learning how to live with who we are. Read it. Read it now' Nathan Filer
Matt Rowland Hill grew up the son of a minister in an evangelical Christian church in south Wales and then south-east England. 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, turning to books before developing a growing relationship with alcohol and drugs. He became addicted to crack and heroin in his early twenties, 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. But ultimately it is 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.
'I tore through this brilliant, fearless book. From the first page to the last, it's funny, insightful and beautifully written' Joe Dunthorne
Title: Original Sins: An extraordinary memoir of faith, family, shame and addiction
Author: Hill, Matt Rowland
ISBN: 9781784743826
Binding:
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Publication Date: 2022-07-07
Number of Pages: 320
Weight: 0.4291 kg
Electric...artfully structured...with novelistic verve... Hill is a blazing talent -- Anthony Cummins * Observer *
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 *
really very good...Hill has a light descriptive touch, but when he aims at poetry, he hits it... Hill's command of tone - his ability to glide beautifully between comedy and horror - has made us trust him happily. -- Kevin Power * Literary Review *
A stunningly well-written, funny, heartrending and utterly gripping memoir about learning how to live with who we are. Read it. Read it now -- Nathan Filer, author of The Shock of the Fall
A wildly original and gripping debut, told with humour and compassion, about what it means to survive -- Christie Watson, author of The Language of Kindness
Ignore, for a moment, the unignorable facts of Matt Rowland Hill's life. Ultimately it's the novelistic virtues of vivid scene-making, fully realised characterisation and psychological subtlety that make Original Sins such an extraordinary book -- Geoff Dyer
What a frightening and funny book, full of shocking, memorable scenes. I'm glad Matt Rowland Hill lived to tell the tale -- Adam Foulds, author of Dream Sequence
a tremendous book -- Laura Cumming
Stunning... What most impressed me about this addiction memoir was its staunch refusal to become an addiction memoir, with the pat journey-into-the-abyss-and-out-again trajectory. Instead, Hill allows his story to be precisely what all of our stories are: a series of days, and hours, and moments in which we are given, over and over, the profound responsibility to choose life over death. -- Jamie Quatro, author of I Want To Show You More
I tore through this brilliant, fearless book. From the first page to the last, it's funny, insightful and beautifully written -- Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine
Original Sins is a shattering portrait of addiction -- it's generously open, desperately honest and confronting. While it is heartbreaking, there is humour and compassion. It's a journey through darkness, against fear, to finding the light in oneself -- Catherine Cho, author of INFERNO
A courageous and often shocking book about the plague of addiction. Yet Original Sins is written with a wild, brilliant humour that offsets the horror. Gripping, hilarious and unforgettable, this is an inspirational survivor's story -- Gabriel Byrne
Matt Rowland Hill has gone to the depths of himself and emerged with something unique, graceful, piercingly smart, and devilishly funny. Many books have been written about addiction. Original Sins is unlike all of them, and stands among the very best -- Rob Doyle, author of Here Are the Young Men
Matt Rowland Hill guides us to the edge of devastation, and doesn't flinch from the ache of addiction, family anguish and inward despair. But this is a book that's optimistic to the core, as honest about grief as it is about joy. I won't forget it -- Jessica J. Lee, author of Two Trees Make a Forest
A tour de force * Scotland on Sunday *
Hill's surviving his journey through religious fundamentalism into hardcore drug addiction is an accomplishment. His writing this memoir--unflinching, heart-rending, funny, insightful as hell--is a triumph. This is a phenomenal book. -- Antoine Wilson, author of The Interloper
A scorching, relentless, absolutely essential read about the roots of addiction and what it takes to save yourself. Hill writes like he has nothing to lose, and like he was born to create this harrowing, utterly transfixing, beautifully wrought portrait of a young man tortured by the twin horrors of family and religion... To take that darkness and make a brilliant, forceful work of literature from it is the holiest alchemy -- Merritt Tierce, author of Love Me Back
Original Sins is a wonderful, shimmering book; a tonal triumph that shifts nimbly between funny, poignant, sly and direct. More than that, within its propulsive, psychologically honest pages, is a genuine wisdom -- Rebecca Watson, author of Little Scratch
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