Hell Is a World Without You
2024 American novel
Hell Is a World Without You is a coming-of-age novel by journalist Jason Kirk. It tells the story of a group of teenagers born into Evangelicalism in the United States. Set in the early 2000s, the novel depicts religious deconstruction, 9/11-era conservative politics, purity culture, end-times paranoia, debates about afterlife theology, and humor about both Christian and secular pop culture.
Hell Is a World Without You was received with positive reviews by critics including Kirkus Reviews and Publishers Weekly, with Sojourners naming it one of the 20 "best faith and justice books of the century." It was a best-seller according to USA Today.
Plot
In the year 2000, 14-year-old Isaac Siena, Jr., a lifelong born-again Christian, seeks friendships at a suburban Pennsylvanian church where his fire-and-brimstone older brother, Eli, works as a volunteer. Both are dealing with their father's death from a few years prior, and they believe he might be suffering in Hell.
Freshman Isaac befriends the pastor's devout son, Josiah, and homeschooled niece, Sophie. At public school, Isaac discovers one of his friends is an atheist and lesbian. By failing to change her religious status, Isaac believes he has contributed to her eventual damnation. His furious internal voice urges him to commit self-harm, but he stops after speaking with Sophie.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q127220509. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000.
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This entry incorporates text from “Hell Is a World Without You” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.