Open, Heaven

Heart-rending…sensuous and decadent… Hewitt’s wistful, reverie-like writing captures the painful queer experience of confusing friendship for romantic love

Financial Times

A mature and complete debut novel… Hewitt’s poetic facility makes easy music of his atmosphere. The central relationship occurs by light, sensitive touch, and reaches arresting emotional depths

New Statesman

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

I loved it . . . Open, Heaven is a beautiful, lyrical and tender novel of youthful passion and the longing for connection. Hewitt’s debut is one to savour

FERDIA LENNON, author of Glorious Exploits

A novel very much about longing in a small village… James’s loneliness shifts and changes and takes on new hues. Incredibly atmospheric. Very God’s Own Country meets Heartstopper. I think people will love it

BRANDON TAYLOR, author of Real Life and The Late Americans

Piercing and intimate, euphoric and elegiac – Open, Heaven is a gorgeous ache of a novel, an exquisitely told story whose characters linger long after you’ve closed the covers.

COLIN WALSH, author of Kala