Open, Heaven

Hewitt writes with such tenderness and grace; in Open, Heaven, beauty, longing and the natural world form a single chord that strikes the heart of the reader with love’s impossibility. The heightened, poetic state of adolescence is perfectly captured here -- ANNE ENRIGHT, Booker Prize-winning author of The Wren, The Wren
Open, Heaven blisses with the bright verdure of youth – blackbirds and blossoming hedges, wet hands held tight under buttery starlight. But Open, Heaven also courses with youth’s great agony, the cruelty that learning to love should be inexorably followed by learning to grieve its undoing. Hewitt's is a searching novel orbiting pleasure, loss, and the ecstatic release of both; which is to say it’s a novel about time. Which is to say it’s a novel about us -- KAVEH AKBAR, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr!
Beautifully written, deeply felt, Open, Heaven does what the very best coming of age stories do: it takes us back to those moments we often dismiss in our own lives, when we felt so deeply, so intensely, and so purely that the world seemed to stop -- MICHAEL MAGEE, author of Close to Home
A searchingly poignant and beautiful novel about how a first love can shape a whole life, Open, Heaven is a deeply felt, lyrical and impossibly tender read. Hewitt exquisitely conjures the passage of time and all the complexities of growing up queer, perfectly captures the way places and events become stitched into memory, and elucidates with rare power how transfixing, incandescent, and transfiguring a first love can be. It made my heart hurt in the best ways -- HELEN MACDONALD, author of H is for Hawk
A gorgeous debut; perfectly encapsulates the dirt and muck of urgent adolescent desire – a novel that thrums with hidden love and concealed truths, it takes the hand of the reader and walks with them through the isolated village of the young queer self -- ANDREW McMILLAN, author of Pity and Physical
Open, Heaven is a striking debut novel from a richly gifted poet and memoirist: an intensely conjured portrayal of the hopeless, all-consuming love of one lonely teenager for another and how it marks him for life. As in Hewitt’s poetry, the beauties of nature erupt throughout, seeming to express the things the two boys cannot voice and the cumulative effect is as bittersweet and elegiac as birdsong -- PATRICK GALE, author of Notes from an Exhibition
A page-turning tale of a first love, Open, Heaven is so tenderly written, so exquisitely crafted. The writing halts time and gives us a visceral sense of this life-changing experience. A wonderful debut -- MONIQUE ROFFEY, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch
I’ve so much to say about this book but I keep coming back to the term ‘pure-hearted’. It’s full of wisdom... It’s so moving, without an ounce of sentimentality. It’s simple and serious but it also manages to be genuinely suspenseful as well. Beautiful -- AIDAN COTTRELL-BOYCE, author of The End of Nightwork
Tender, timeless, troubled and true, Seán Hewitt’s desirous debut sees him as something of a modern successor to the heady and heartfelt writings of DH Lawrence or EM Forster. In other words: the real deal -- BENJAMIN MYERS, author of The Gallows Pole
Here is love with all its aches and calibrations, a tender, moving novel which gently embraces the reader. As the summer of love proves to be the briefest of seasons Hewitt quietly hymns the countryside too, charting its rhythms and leafy changes, as the poet in him shines insistently through -- JON GOWER, author of The Turning Tide