Top 10 books about losing faith

Matt Rowland Hill was born in 1984 in Pontypridd, South Wales, and grew up in Wales and England. His writing has appeared in the Guardian, the Independent, New Statesman, the Telegraph and other outlets. He now lives in London.

His memoir, Original Sins, is his first book.

At the Guardian Hill tagged ten books that

tell stories of individuals wrestling not only with doubt in God but in families, institutions, political systems and the meaning of life itself. And, taken together, they seem to suggest – to me, at least – that ultimately our best hope of salvation lies in the miracle of art.

One title on the list:

Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi

When Gifty, the daughter of Ghanaian migrants to the US, discovers that her brother has died of an opiate overdose, she loses her Christian faith in an instant: “One minute there was a God with the whole world in his hands; the next minute the world was plummeting, ceaselessly, towards an ever-shifting bottom.” Gyasi’s short novel takes in a host of themes – religion, family, addiction, grief, science, race – in a fearless exploration of the various ways we seek to survive unbearable loss.

Read about the other entries on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue