All Down Darkness Wide

Reviews / Votes

A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon * Sunday Times * A remarkable memoir of love and sorrow * Observer * We are witnessing the emergence of a major talent... stunning. A space will need to be made on the Queer Classics shelf * Irish Independent * Intensely original... some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years -- Alexander Chee * The Atlantic * Exquisitely written... a fervent appeal for presence and belonging -- Claire Messud * Harper's Magazine * Hewitt's book is excellent... It makes one hope this is the beginning of a wonderful trend of men writing about love with the same intense vulnerability that women have for decades now... [Hewitt] shows himself to be one of our foremost memoirists... A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon. Let us hope it is but a first volume, the beginning of a vast work. * Sunday Times * Rapturous... even his depictions of cruising have a holy aura. As a dedicated nonfiction writer, I sometimes meet poets' memoirs with a caginess that is utterly disgraced by a book like this, whose structure is nearly as immaculate as its sentences... Writing is always an act of translation, and Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own. -- Melissa Febos * New York Times * [An] extraordinary memoir... All Down Darkness Wide is not about answers. It does not offer glib consolations and is all the more powerful and affecting for that. * Observer * Some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years... intensely original. -- Alexander Chee * The Atlantic * [P]oignant and painful, rigorous and sensual... Hewitt has forged a life-enhancing memoir... This book stands alongside Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast as an outstanding chronicle of a gay poet's journey of self-discovery. -- Michael Arditti * The Spectator * A book glittering with beguiling detail... Discursive yet succinct, humane, unsparing of its author, All Down Darkness Wide will surely take its place alongside H is for Hawk as a hard-to-categorise memoir hybrid whose sales will catch fire through word-of-mouth recommendations. -- Patrick Gale * Irish Times * Sean Hewitt's book is a beautiful, complex and textured meditation on love, on growing up gay, on becoming a poet and on inhabiting Northern landscapes in winter. His account of falling in love and being in love is honest and vivid... I was engrossed, hardly looking up as I read. I woke in the morning fully enclosed by it, as though I had been dreaming it. -- Colm Toibin, author of THE MAGICIAN Sean Hewitt's memoir is extraordinarily beautiful... moving, and humane; it is the best new work of non-fiction I've read in years. -- Sarah Perry, author of THE ESSEX SERPENT The book in your hands is a precious, living thing, each page alive with ache and with love, with truth and with tenderness. [A] writer whose work will continue to be treasured long after our lifetimes. A wonder. -- Doireann Ni Ghriofa, author of A GHOST IN THE THROAT Gorgeous and moving prose that excavates the deep complexities of grief, shame and love with a tenderness and lightness of touch that makes the words sing. -- Andrew McMillan, author of PHYSICAL All Down Darkness Wide is a searing and sublime account of the scars left by intolerance and how they shape a self. Hewitt's gorgeous prose gleams like a dayspring in the dimness, his story lingering long after the book is closed. -- Melissa Harrison, author of ALL AMONG THE BARLEY It's impossible not to be intensely moved by this book, written with a poet's eye for detail... His memoir of queer discovery, loves found and lost, the past that we carry with us, and ultimately of becoming, feels like a future classic. -- Niven Govinden, author of DIARY OF A FILM [A] very beautiful, very intelligent book. It is of course a moving portrait of very human fragilities, but it also testifies to the power of the heart and mind to survive all kinds of grief and emerge with much of value to say to the world. -- Okechukwu Nzelu, author of HERE AGAIN NOW A wondrous act of recollection: flickering yet sonorous, elemental, humid, full of ache, flecked with ironic comedy. Hewitt makes shimmering magic from shame and shyness... This book arrives as if it was there all along, foxed and dog-eared from the first page. -- Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of GAY BAR Luminous and utterly original, a book with its own darkly beautiful gravity. I can't think of anything I have read like it - in terms of style and sensibility, and emotional daring. -- Niamh Campbell, author of THIS HAPPY