Open, Heaven

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Set in the English countryside, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year as two teenage boys meet and transform each other's lives. On the cusp of adulthood, James dreams of another life far away from his small village. Beholden to the expectations of home and family, his burgeoning desire - an ache for autonomy, tenderness and sex - threatens to unravel his shy exterior. Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm. Luke comes with a reputation for danger, yet underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own. As the seasons pass, and the pair form an ever-changing bond, James falls into a terrifying first love that will transform his life forever. Enthralling and richly immersive, Open, Heaven is a debut novel about the freedom of youth, the sacrifices of friendship, and the possibilities of love in all its forms.

Reviews

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 loves 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 youths 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 its a novel about time. Which is to say its 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

Author Bio

Sean Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture's Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses- Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.