The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

A cornerstone of the canon, James Hogg’s 1824 masterpiece The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner is a brilliant portrayal of the power of evil. Set in early eighteenth-century Scotland, the novel recounts the corruption of a boy of strict Calvinist upbringing by a mysterious stranger under whose influence he commits a series of murders. Superbly crafted and deftly executed, Hogg’s book resists any easy explanation of events; is this stranger a figment of the imagination or the devil himself? This is the complete edition of Hogg’s Confessions, including the engraved frontispiece and the (fictional) dedication, omitted from most editions since its first publication in 1824. Today it still serves as a disturbing insight into the dark heart of the human soul and a scathing critique of the strictures of organised religion.

Reviews of The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner

* Hogg's enduring masterpiece is a triumph and deserves to be read, enjoyed and discussed by a new generation. Ian Rankin, from his introduction * Hogg's masterpiece is a psychological thriller, a metaphysical puzzle and a theological and philosophical maze all in one. Its inconsistencies and unresolved questions are what make it at once so gripping and yet so hard to grasp. A strange, disturbing obsession of a book, and a key text of Scottish literature. James Robertson, author of THE TESTAMENT OF GIDEON MACK * James Hogg's Confessions is one of the great works on that sinister border between the supernatural and the psychological – a borderland that Scottish authors seem to have explored with a particular relish. Its atmosphere is unique, its penetration is shocking, and the truthfulness of its account of religious mania is both timeless and timely. Philip Pullman