Excommunicated: A multigenerational story of leaving the Exclusive Brethren

A heart-wrenching multigenerational family memoir by an excommunicated member of the Exclusive Brethren


After coming out as gay as a teenager, Craig Hoyle was excommunicated from the New Zealand Exclusive Brethren. The conservative sect was everything he’d ever known – a childhood where television, pop music, sports and even pets were against the rules. Cast out for wickedness, Craig said goodbye to his family forever.

Joining public society – the ‘worldlies’ – for the first time, Craig sets out to meet his grandfather who was excommunicated in the 1980s without the chance to say goodbye to his children. Using his grandfather’s records, diaries and letters, Craig uncovers two centuries and seven generations of the family’s cruel and tangled relationship with the Brethren, and discovers that he is not as much of a black sheep as he had been made to think.

Weaving the family’s past with Craig’s own upbringing and rebellion in one of New Zealand’s most secretive and oppressive religious sects, this book charts the story of the Exclusive Brethren in New Zealand and the heart-wrenching lives of a family torn apart by it.

Format: Paperback
Pages: 336
Imprint: HarperCollins NZ
Publication date: 01/11/2023