Open, Heaven

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!

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 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

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

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

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 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

Open, Heaven beautifully conveys the pain and possibility of first love. Written with generosity, this is a coming-of-age story whose protagonist never turns his gaze from the friend he desires, nor from the man he longs to become

CAOILINN HUGHES, author of The Wild Laughter

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

Superb… Anchored by a grounded sense of place and the universal theme of adolescent longing, Hewitt’s narrative strikes a resonant chord. It’s a stunner

Publishers Weekly

[A] stunning debut novel… It is an exploration of vulnerability, desire, and the bittersweet beauty of love in all its forms

Irish Country Magazine

A story about the agony and ecstasy of first love

BBC, ‘The most exciting books to read in 2025’

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

Readers looking for gorgeous language and richly developed atmosphere will be impressed and moved… A queer coming-of-age novel that achieves rare peaks of lyricism and emotional intensity

Kirkus Reviews

Illuminates the complexity of gay adolescence with exceptional insight and graceful prose… a must-read for fans of Douglas Stuart and Brandon Taylor

Booklist

A beautiful coming of age story about two teenage boys in rural England, exploring sexual awakening and desire as well as the human need for love. Hewitt's writing will stop you in your tracks.

The Gloss

Accomplished . . . Feelings of love, desire, yearning, fear are mirrored and heightened by an intensely vivid natural world

Irish Times

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

A novel built on watching, lingering, hoping, it’s rich and intense…with lush descriptions of the rural setting… A tale of thwarted yearning

Daily Mail

Young love: we’ve all known its roiling agonies and shimmering ecstasies… It is the totalising force of youthful infatuation that forms Hewitt’s true subject, and it has rarely been documented with such fidelity and tenderness

PARAIC O’DONNELL, Irish Times

This is a story of love in all its guises and faces and places… It is a year of imperishable moments and yearnings as love is unveiled in its many splendours

RTÉ Guide

The poet and author of All Down Darkness Wide captures the sweet intoxication and great agony of adolescence in his debut novel – a luminous portrayal of two teenagers bonding with each other over one heady, transformative year

Waterstones

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

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 tender, eloquent debut novel: in adulthood a man returns (in place and memory) to the village in northern England where, as a teen, he met Luke, his first love

Vanity Fair

Full of teenage longing and quiet devastations, Hewitt’s Open, Heaven proves the continued staying power of poets-turned-novelists… Fans of Call Me By Your Name will enjoy this rumination on the angst of a first love, set across one transformative year

USA Today

Poet Seán Hewitt’s debut novel of youthful infatuation

New York Magazine

Full of yearning and lush descriptions of the English countryside

The Cut

An exquisite tale of first love . . . Hewitt is superb in his loving and acute descriptions of the natural world

SARAH PERRY, Guardian

Heart-rending . . . sensuous and decadent

Financial Times

A beautiful novel about how a first love can shape a whole life

HELEN MACDONALD, author of H is for Hawk

A gorgeous debut . . . a novel that thrums with hidden love and concealed truths

ANDREW McMILLAN, author of Pity and Physical

Blisses with the bright verdure of youth . . . It’s a novel about us

KAVEH AKBAR, author of Martyr!

A luminous portrayal of two teenagers bonding with each other over one heady, transformative year

Waterstones

A beautiful, lyrical and tender novel of youthful passion and the longing for connection

FERDIA LENNON, author of Glorious Exploits

A mature and complete debut novel . . . The central relationship occurs by light, sensitive touch, and reaches arresting emotional depths

New Statesman

A striking debut novel . . . as bittersweet and elegiac as birdsong

PATRICK GALE, author of Notes from an Exhibition

Open, Heaven is a beautifully melancholic coming-of-age novel that astutely captures the pain and pleasure of yearning. Written with a remarkable attention to detail that makes the page come to life, I was thoroughly immersed

JENNY MUSTARD, author of Okay Days

The elegiac strangeness of the story…stems from its timelessness… Open, Heaven brought me back…to the melancholy of what might have been or to the things left incomplete and unsaid

ArtReview

The writing is a model of restraint . . . alternately bracing and poeticised . . . Hewitt’s prose is full of the names of wildflowers whose blooming and wilting mark the arrival and departure of the seasons

Literary Review

Exquisite . . . It’s a carefully crafted depiction of what it can mean to be in any way different in a place that holds little empathy, and what it’s like to hold a torch for someone that burns so brightly it risks engulfing you . . . It’s a book that already feels like a classic

Rick O’Shea, Irish Independent

Superb . . . It reflects on the headiness of youth

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