Open, Heaven

Reviews / Votes

An achingly beautiful story of first love in the English countryside . . . Lyrical, atmospheric and transporting * Guardian, *Summer Reads of 2025* * Hewitt is superb in his loving and acute descriptions of the natural world -- SARAH PERRY A gorgeous debut novel about an all-encompassing first love... I promise it's amazing! -- Jack Edwards @jack_edwards Heart-rending . . . sensuous and decadent * Financial Times * A beautiful, lyrical and tender novel of youthful passion and the longing for connection -- FERDIA LENNON, author of Glorious Exploits A beautiful novel about how a first love can shape a whole life -- HELEN MACDONALD, author of H is for Hawk A mature and complete debut novel . . . The central relationship occurs by light, sensitive touch, and reaches arresting emotional depths * New Statesman * Blisses with the bright verdure of youth . . . It's a novel about us -- KAVEH AKBAR, author of Martyr! A gorgeous debut . . . a novel that thrums with hidden love and concealed truths -- ANDREW McMILLAN, author of Pity and Physical A luminous portrayal of two teenagers bonding with each other over one heady, transformative year * Waterstones * A striking debut novel . . . as bittersweet and elegiac as birdsong -- PATRICK GALE, author of Notes from an Exhibition Accomplished . . . Feelings of love, desire, yearning, fear are mirrored and heightened by an intensely vivid natural world * Irish Times * 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 * A story about the agony and ecstasy of first love * BBC, 'The most exciting books to read in 2025' * 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 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 * 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 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 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 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 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 * 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 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 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 Tender, timeless, troubled and true, Sean 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 [A] stunning debut novel... It is an exploration of vulnerability, desire, and the bittersweet beauty of love in all its forms * Irish Country Magazine * 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 * 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 * RTE 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 *