Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt

Poet and memoirist Seán Hewitt’s fiction debut explores early 2000s queer rural life in Northern England. Since coming out, sixteen-year-old James has felt removed from his family and village. Enter Luke: a slightly older boy sent to live on his uncle’s farm for a year while his father is incarcerated. James is drawn to him, and though they form a (perhaps unlikely) friendship, he never feels on even footing. Luke is brash, socially confident, sometimes difficult, drawing the shy James out of his shell. But Luke is concealing a deep wound, while James’s younger brother’s poor health is about to throw his family into crisis. With their time together limited, teenage tragedy is inevitable – yet James becomes more himself with each passing day.

In keeping with the etymology of the word, with “algos” meaning pain, this device of looking backward is never sentimental but always a little bit painful.

Hewitt’s first novel is an impressive accomplishment, technically and emotionally. A framing narrative – the thirty-something James returning to his hometown following a divorce – covers the the novel in a haze of nostalgia. In keeping with the etymology of the word, with “algos” meaning pain, this device of looking backward is never sentimental but always a little bit painful. The language is evocative, rendering both the rural atmosphere and the emotional intimacy between these characters with vivid precision. Although the queer bildungsroman has been done many times, there is something about Hewitt’s writing – perhaps the particular pain of James’s yearning, or the exploration of time – that makes this novel feel fresh and understated at the same time.

I was particularly struck by the complexity of the relationships Hewitt depicts. Of course, the relationship between James and Luke is central to the novel, and it is complex and difficult: James never quite knows where he stands with Luke, if his feelings are destined to be unrequited or if Luke even likes him as a friend. But it was the relationship between James and his mother – which takes up much less space in the novel – that I found particularly poignant for how much it hurt. James’s mother is loving and supportive, but, feeling that she pities him for being an outsider, he pushes her away, and then feels guilty for doing so. He can hurt her because he is so close to her, and he does. This, combined with his obsession with Luke, is a marker of his immaturity – and one of the key ways through which Hewitt establishes emotional authenticity in his conflicted teenage narrator.

But it was the relationship between James and his mother – which takes up much less space in the novel – that I found particularly poignant for how much it hurt.

Though most of the novel is told chronologically, the framing device does suggest an atypical relationship to time. James knows from the beginning that his time with Luke is limited, as he is due to return home after a year. He is always anticipating the future, both hoping for a larger and more satisfying life and dreading the passing of time that will separate him from Luke. And the adult James not only looks towards the past but seems to dwell in it to a near pathological degree. This may perhaps be read as a fictional depiction of queer temporality, defined by theorist Jack Halberstam as “those specific models of temporality that emerge within postmodernism once one leaves the temporal frames of bourgeois reproduction and family, longevity, risk/safety, and inheritance,” a challenge to concepts like linear progress, productivity, and normative ways of living. In inhabiting first the future and then the past, James disrupts chronology and linearity and embodies queer ways of living in time.

Though this is Hewitt’s debut novel, his experience as a writer in other genres is clearly on display in his technical abilities. I am particularly impressed by his restraint, with the primary emotional arc concluded in a way that feels understated yet no less painful. This is a debut that will appeal to readers who enjoy character-driven literary fiction – and those readers will certainly be keeping an eye on whatever Hewitt does next!

Seán 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 their “30 under 30” artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is published by Jonathan Cape in the U.K. and Penguin Press in the United States (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in nonfiction, 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.

Publisher: Knopf Canada (April 15, 2025)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 224 pages
ISBN: 9781039056565

Clementine Oberst

Clementine Oberst is a Ph.D. candidate specializing in television studies. Born and raised in Toronto, she has lived in Montreal and Glasgow and now calls Hamilton home. When she isn't writing her dissertation, Clementine can be found knitting, trying to cultivate a green thumb, and playing with her cats. She loves nothing more than losing herself in a good book. You can connect with her on Instagram @clementinereads.