Original sins : a memoir

** A Sunday Times, New Statesman and Guardian Book of the Year ****Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2022**'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 FilerMatt 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