Leaving Alexandria: A Memoir of Faith and Doubt

In one of the most remarkable memoirs of recent years, the acclaimed writer, respected thinker and outspoken former bishop Richard Holloway takes us back through a life defined by the biggest questions: Who am I? And what is God? At the tender age of fourteen, Richard Holloway left his home in the Vale of Leven, north of Glasgow, and travelled hundreds of miles to be educated and trained for the priesthood by a religious order in an English monastery. It was an intense, cloistered education for an impressionable young man. By twenty-five he had been ordained and was working in the slums of Glasgow. Throughout the forty years that followed, Richard touched the lives of many people in the Church and in the wider community. But behind his confident public face lay a restless, unquiet heart and a constantly searching mind. How can anyone claim a complete understanding of the mystery of existence? Why is the Church, which claims to be the instrument of God’s love, so prone to cruelty and condemnation? And how can a man live with the tension between public faith and private doubt?In his long-awaited memoir, Richard seeks to answer these questions and to explain how, after many crises of faith, he finally and painfully left the Church. It is a wise, poetic and fiercely honest book. As a portrait of an inner life plagued by doubt, it is unsurpassed.