Open, Heaven - by Seán Hewitt (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A stunning novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, a luminous and intensely evocative portrayal of two teeneagers bonding with each other over one heady, transformative year.

"[Open, Heaven] 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, author of Martyr!

Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other's lives.

James--a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old--is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village's leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his reach: autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents--his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man--Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him "like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre," drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke's bravado is a deep wound--a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.

Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms.

Review Quotes

LONGLISTED FOR THE SWANSEA UNIVERSITY DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE

"Seán Hewitt's 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, author of Martyr!

"Seán Hewitt's 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 A Place Called Winter

"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, author of The Wren, the Wren

"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

"Hewitt's language is lush and beaming. The world he creates in his storytelling is well-realized. . . . Open, Heaven is a soaring demonstration that 'heaven' is a place that we ourselves create, gilded over and rippling in our imaginations." --The Brooklyn Rail

"Illuminates the complexity of gay adolescence with exceptional insight and graceful prose . . . With its masterful interiority, Hewitt's novel will be a must-read for fans of Édouard Louis, Douglas Stuart, and Brandon Taylor." --Booklist (starred review)

"A poet's novel. . . . Wordsworth meets Justin Torres in its aching intensity and passionate descriptions." --Kirkus Reviews

"Seán Hewitt's lyrical, elegiac novel tenderly unfolds a queer coming-of-age and makes a case for the primacy of first love--even if unrequited, even if lost." --Shelf Awareness

"A luminescent debut from one of the most brilliant young poets writing today. Open, Heaven is a gorgeous, heartbreaking queer coming-of-age novel on the unrelenting yearning and agony of first love." --Foyles

"Tender, skilled and epiphanic. . . . "A singular vision, in which profound sincerity of feeling--and the treatment of sexual desire as something close to sacred--is matched with an almost reckless beauty of expression." --The Guardian

"Sensuous and decadent. . . . Hewitt's wistful, reverie-like writing captures the painful queer experience of confusing friendship for romantic love." --Financial Times

"Hewitt's poetic facility makes easy music of his atmosphere. The central relationship occurs by light, sensitive touch, and reaches arresting emotional depths." --The New Statesman

About the Author

SEÁN HEWITT's debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, won the Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times (London) as one of their "30 under 30" artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the United States (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in nonfiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and for a LAMBDA award, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. Hewitt is assistant professor in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.