The book that set off a worldwide bidding frenzy in 2008 is finally hitting the shelves in the United States on June 15. Paul Hoffman’s The Left Hand of God follows the story of Thomas Cale, a teenager imprisoned in The Sanctuary, a brutal institution that trains boys to become warriors in an imminent holy war. This isn’t entirely a fantasy world — much of it is based on Hoffman’s own experiences growing up in an extremist Catholic boarding school. He recently spoke with Shelf Life about his childhood, how he turned his own story into a work of fiction, and what it was like reliving such difficult memories.

How did you get the idea for The Left Hand of God? Had you been thinking about writing this for a long time?
I’ve written two other novels and had been a screenwriter for some time. I tend to do everything the wrong way around in my life, and I did the same again. When I started out writing my first novel it wasn’t autobiographical, but now in my 50s I thought I would go back to my childhood, which was very odd and not like a normal one at all. From the age of 20 I led a perfectly normal life, but the first 20 years of my life were very strange.

I was born in a house without running water, my father was one of the pioneers of free-fall parachuting, and I saw several people die before I was seven years old doing that. I saw him come very close to it quite often. I was around soldiers all my life. My parents were Irish immigrants, Catholics, and they were sweet people but I was brought up by a particularly strict order and they were very violent. When my father was sent abroad to Africa, my brother and I both went to a boarding school that was very tough indeed, and that was the basis for the Sanctuary in the book. It was run really like a prison, and we were there all except about six weeks a year. It was tough; really thinking about it years later, I came back to regard it as an extraordinarily strange period. That was the inspiration for the first half of the book, the hero is trying to live inside an institution that is incredibly unpleasant, and just trying to survive around people who were often extremely cruel and who have an extraordinarily fanatical and extremist view of life, and given I think the nature of extremism both Islamic and Catholic, it seemed like a very timely thing to draw on.

Where are you from originally, and where was this boarding school located?
I was born in England. Both my parents were born in Ireland, but they came over when they got married. They were working class, but obviously many Americans will know when you move to a new country, you more or less always drop down a class or two, and we really had nothing. READ FULL STORY »