Original Sins: A Memoir

In this exquisite and unflinching debut, the son of a Welsh Baptist minister recounts his harrowing spiral into drug addiction. Throughout his life, Hill dealt with contradictions. Raised in Swansea, Wales, in the 1980s, Hill and his three siblings endured childhood trauma in a home “thick with misery” and dominated by a melancholic, taciturn Baptist minister father and a hypercritical mother who regarded any secular pastime as “the works of the devil.” With raging hormones during puberty, Hill ran the gauntlet of “temptation, sin, despair, [and] repentance” and by his teens was having sex and surreptitiously downing bottles of whiskey. After struggling to reconcile his strict religious orthodoxy with the less punitive Anglicanism of his prestigious boarding school, Hill eventually renounced his Baptist beliefs, became an atheist, and turned to drugs in college to blot his pain, shame, and guilt. In visceral detail, Hill recounts his descent into intravenous heroin use and the damage it wrought until he found his way to a shaky recovery after 40 days in a London psychiatric ward. Combined with his stunning prose, his clever use of biblical metaphors—which trace his “Genesis,” “Rapture,” and “Noble Truths”—makes his story of salvation all the more affecting. In a sea of addiction memoirs, this stands out. (July)