Original Sins
- Author Matt Rowland Hill
- Narrator Daniel Hawksford
- Publisher Random House
- Run Time 9 hours and 39 minutes
- Format Audio
- Genre Biography and non-fiction prose, Christian Churches, denominations, groups, Drugs and alcohol: social aspects, Memoirs, Society and Social Sciences, True stories of heroism, endurance and survival.
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What to expect
Brought to you by Penguin.
'Isn't everyone's childhood an indoctrination in the more or less deranged outlook of the people who raised them? And isn't growing up for everyone a more or less successful attempt to overcome their conditioning and see clearly, with their own eyes?'
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, the ever-present threat of hell and damnation, and a burgeoning cycle of temptation, sin and shame. 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. This story takes us to his bleakest, most desperate moments and recounts his struggle towards the light.
Original Sins is an extraordinary memoir. It is a story of faith, family, loss, shame and addiction, but ultimately it is about survival, growing up and learning to live. It's recklessly honest, as funny as it is grave, courageous and compulsive.
© Matt Rowland Hill 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022
Critics Review
Electric…artfully structured…with novelistic verve… Hill is a blazing talent
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
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
This book is brilliant. The writing shimmers off the page
[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
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
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
A stunningly well-written, funny, heartrending and utterly gripping memoir about learning how to live with who we are. Read it. Read it now
A wildly original and gripping debut, told with humour and compassion, about what it means to survive
What a frightening and funny book, full of shocking, memorable scenes. I’m glad Matt Rowland Hill lived to tell the tale
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