Open Heaven is the debut novel by Irish poet Seán Hewitt is reminiscent of Garth Greenwell, Justin Torres and Andre Aciman in the intensity of its evocation of sexual awakening. Set in a remote village in the North of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two 16 year-old boys meet and transform each other’s lives. Open Heaven is a lyrical queer love story that’s out on April 15 from Knopf.
James — a sheltered, shy 16-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 at their farm just outside the village. James is immediately 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 economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms in his debut novel.
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 as one of its “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 USA (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in non-fiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and for a LAMBDA award, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. Seán is Assistant Professor in Literary Practice at Trinity College Dublin, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
—From staff reports