Winner of the PEN/Ackerley Prize 2013.

At the tender age of fourteen, Richard Holloway left his home town of Alexandria, north of Glasgow, and travelled hundreds of miles to be educated and trained for the priesthood at an English monastery. By the age of twenty-five he had been ordained and was working in the slums of Glasgow. Through the forty years that followed, Richard touched the lives of many people as he rose to one of the highest positions in the Anglican Church. But behind his confident public faith lay a restless heart and an inquisitive mind.

Poignant, wise and fiercely honest, Leaving Alexandria is a remarkable memoir of a life defined by faith but plagued by doubt.

"Leaving Alexandria is a profound, personal investigation of the virtues and flaws of religion and the most stirring autobiography I have read in a great many years. It is also a meditation on the nature of one's own identity" - * New Statesman *

"A beautifully written and often funny, emotional and intellectual self-exploration by one of the most extraordinary churchmen of our time" - * Sunday Times *

"Candid and deeply moving . . . Nobody could fail to be intensely moved by the final chapters of his memoir . . . a deeply lovable man; and what a wonderful book he has written" - * Observer *

"This is a portrait of a formerly devoted Christian who, by confessing his faults and doubts to us, becomes exemplary, an Everyman, and a guide to how we too might lose faith without sacrificing our souls" - * The Times *

"Leaving Alexandria gives a profound sense of the benefits, as well as the difficulties, that accrue from taking a zigzag path through life . . . it summarises an argument that a lot of people will find sympathetic, as well as compelling" - * Guardian *

"Captures the bewildering range of churches within the Church . . . Holloway certainly throws down the gauntlet - with a quiet, elegiac passion - to Christians who arm themselves in certainty . . . They should read this wide, erudite book as a matter of urgency" - * Sunday Telegraph *

"This is a deeply moving and disturbing biography. Holloway, is a confident author, assured when recreating both the past and the feelings that moments evoked . . . A writer capable of considerable brilliance, an intellectual who can provoke thought, a genuinely good man trying to be better" - * Herald *