Open, Heaven

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. As he contends with the expectations of his 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, but underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own.With the passing seasons, the two teenagers grow closer and the bond that emerges between them transforms their lives. James falls deeply for Luke, yet he is never sure of Luke's true feelings. And as the end of summer nears, he has a choice to make - will he risk everything for the possibility of love?

An exquisite tale of first love… Hewitt’s depiction of an enthralled and uncertain love is painfully convincing… Hewitt is superb in his loving and acute depictions of the natural world -- SARAH PERRY Guardian
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
A story about the agony and ecstasy of first love BBC, ‘The most exciting books to read in 2025’
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
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
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 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

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.

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