Pure Colour: the new novel from the author of Motherhood and How Should A Person Be

(Paperback)

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Heartbreaking, exciting, profound- a short epic that reimagines what the novel can do 'Beautiful and impossible to put down. Sheila Heti is a genius.' Avni Doshi 'This one-of-a-kind novel... feels nothing less than vital.' Observer 'Pure Colour is an original, a book that says something new for our difficult times.' Anne Enright, Guardian 'A treat to read.' Stylist *A Guardian, Financial Times, New Statesman, Daily Mail, AnOther and Cosmopolitan Books for 2022 pick* What if this world is just a first draft, made by some great artist in order to be destroyed In this first draft, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira's chest like a portal - to what, she doesn't know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and she enters that strange and dizzying dimension that true loss opens up. Pure Colour tells the story of a life, from beginning to end. It is a galaxy of a novel- explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and a shape-shifting epic. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold. _______________________ PRAISE FOR SHEILA HETI- 'Exhilarating...it made me want to write' Sally Rooney, on How Should a Person Be 'Sheila Heti has broken new ground' Rachel Cusk, on Motherhood 'Complex, artfully messy and hilarious' Miranda July, on How Should a Person Be 'Thrilling, very funny, and almost unbearably moving' Garth Greenwell, on Motherhood 'Courageous, necessary, visionary' Elif Batuman, on Motherhood

Reviews

An impressive spectrum of meaning and feeling, both abstract and tangible... This one-of-a-kind novel... feels nothing less than vital. -- Anthony Cummins * Observer *
Pure Colour is the apocalypse written as trance, a sleepwalker's song about the end of all things... There is also Heti's lovely prose to enjoy, her beautifully sustained tone, the way she is, as a writer, earnest, funny and sweet... Pure Colour is an original, a book that says something new for our difficult times. -- Anne Enright * Guardian *
Exemplifies both originality and sharpness... the kind of book that you start reading again as soon as you finish it, to see how on earth the author pulled it off... Descriptions of grief that are so surprising and true they made me gasp. -- Hadley Freeman * Guardian *
Pure Colour is not just a novel, it's a creation myth, a fairy tale, a story about making art and living on this planet. A story about death and the irresistible inner stirrings that bring us back to life. Beautiful and impossible to put down. Sheila Heti is a genius. -- Avni Doshi
Wonderfully entertaining... a treat to read. Expect to take in the work of a true wordsmith. -- Kiran Meeda * Stylist *
What makes Heti's novels so compelling is... the questions her characters need answering at moments of flux in their lives... [Pure Colour] left me full of admiration and wonder. -- Johanna Thomas-Corr * New Statesman *
An explicitly mystical book... So new...This book, so full of argument, feels weightless. -- Parul Sehgal * The New Yorker *
Just like that, there's magic. Like Iris Murdoch's novels, Heti's are philosophically intense, although Heti's work is pared down where Murdoch's was Rabelaisian. Heti owns a sharp axe. In Pure Colour the wood chips that fall are as interesting as the sculpture that gets made. -- Dwight Garner * The New York Times *
Buoyed by a dazzling assortment of questions, curiosities and wild propositions that betray the author's agile and untamed mind...[Pure Colour] brings into view a certain organic and ecstatic wholeness: bright splashes of feeling and folly, of grief and loss...[it] defies classification. -- Alexandra Kleeman * New York Times Book Review *
Heti excels at small moments, delicately revealed. * Daily Telegraph *
Heti is brilliant at nailing down universal cultural experiences. * Sunday Times *
A philosophical fable about art, death, faith and the perilous state of the universe. * Daily Mail *
It isn't often that a novel dares to rethink the order of the universe we live in, yet in Pure Colour, Sheila Heti aims for just that. Making new sense of our cracked world through a vulnerable meditation on love and art that feels both personal and cosmic, this is a book that takes good care of its reader, and heals. -- Livia Franchini
The most timely, urgent book of 2022... It feels both as thrillingly inventive as [Heti's] ever been and also defiantly and satisfyingly middle-aged... Genius. -- Lynn Steger Strong * Los Angeles Times *
Pure Colour is unabashedly metaphysical and completely outlandish...Yet neither grief nor theology can suppress Heti's oddball wit and affection for wildly inappropriate sexual metaphors, for which a reader should be grateful... Heti is the rare mystic with a sense of humor. -- Judith Shulevitz * The Atlantic *
Sheila Heti has the innate ability to capture feelings and thinkings that can seem so mercurial, and to provoke new avenues of thought on social codes, with challenge, care, and clarity. Her writing is both a relief and an invigoration. -- Anna Cafolla * AnOther, *Books to Look Out For 2022* *
Pure Colour will make you question life and choices in the same philosophical and lyrically written way. -- Alice Snape * Cosmopolitan, *Books to Look Our For 2022* *
Heti has evolved the leanest, more powerful, playful, and entirely unique form for writing ideas. With one foot in the everyday and another in the floating world, Pure Colour is a pure feat. -- Joanna Walsh
Pure Colour...[is] a honed gem, a surreal bildungsroman... With its philosophical meditations, poetic vignettes and absurdist comedy, it is...a bracing reminder that the novel is the literary form where a writer is free to do anything... Heti...[is] an original and influential voice in contemporary fiction -- Max Liu * i *
Heti's... writing is beguiling, funny and wise. The novel's surreal elements invite as many interpretations as an abstract painting -- Alastair Curtis * Prospect *
Heti's work is always original - that Pure Colour is also deeply moving makes it all the more remarkable * New Statesman, *The best books of 2022 so far* *
Compelling -- Emily Witt * London Review of Books *
A philosophical novel as timely as the fictions of Camus and Hesse were for another generation. Heti's voice, however, is entirely her own: bold, searching, hilarious, simultaneously artful and artless... her grandest...novel yet * Times Literary Supplement, *Books of the Year* *

Author Bio

Sheila Heti is the author of ten books, including the novels Motherhood and How Should a Person Be, which New York magazine deemed one of the 'New Classics of the twenty-first century' and which was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She was named one of the 'New Vanguard' by the New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a best book of the year. Her novels have been translated into twenty-four languages. She is the former interviews editor of The Believer magazine. She lives in Toronto.