Open, Heaven
A Novel
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Open, Heaven
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Narrateur(s):
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Sebastian Croft
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Auteur(s):
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Seán Hewitt
À propos de cet audio
A stunning debut novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, reminiscent of Garth Greenwell and Justin Torres 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 teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives.
James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-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 on their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him "like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre," 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 striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.
©2025 Seán Hewitt (P)2025 Random House AudioCe que les critiques en disent
"Seán Hewitt’s 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, author of Martyr!
“Seán Hewitt’s 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 A Place Called Winter
“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, author of The Wren, the Wren
Editorial Review
Ce que les auditeurs disent de Open, Heaven
Moyenne des évaluations de clientsÉvaluations – Cliquez sur les onglets pour changer la source des évaluations.
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Au global4 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Histoire3 out of 5 stars
- CKH
- 2025-05-23
Has more pine than an old-growth forest.
I bought this on the basis of a gushing Guardian review. But it was not for me. Don’t come here looking for plot - as there isn’t one, not really.
BUT what it lacks in narrative momentum, it more than makes up for in lyrical prose. The imagery is absolutely stunning. I often found myself pausing just to savour a single phrase which would be either emotionally spot on, or evocative and beautiful.
That said, beautiful writing alone couldn’t carry this for me. James, the central character, is a self-absorbed, lonely obsessive, and while that’s clearly intentional, I found him so frustrating. His fixation seems to drive him toward an ultimately unhappy life (or so the hints go) yet why? The object of his fixation did not really seem to have the heft that his pining merited. The consequences of his emotions feel murky and unsatisfying.
In the end, I was left disappointed. As a coming-of-age novel, it feels emotionally overwrought but unsatisfying. Gorgeous writing yes. But hollow.
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