Beautiful and poetic, this book really captured the wholly consuming nature of first love.

I loved the way James’ obsession grew and the desperation he felt was so tangible. It was also an incredibly lonely novel. Honestly, it echoed with loneliness and I almost felt the ache of it. James was both hopeful and fearful for the future, and I think that worked so well for a coming of age novel like this.

I also liked that he had come out prior to the start of the book - I’m kind of over coming out narratives now, so a story about discovering who you are and what love means to you without that was pretty unique.

The subplot with Eddie and his health was also really interesting. I also found the relationship James had with his mother compelling.

There wasn’t quite enough of Luke for me though, and at times it felt a bit meandering. That being said, I did enjoy the stream of consciousness vibes to a level, so that’s fair.

Thanks NetGalley and Vintage for the arc!

As much as I loved the writing, I unfortunately had to DNF this one around the 30% mark. Eddie, the brother of James, has seizures and epilepsy and this is a massive personal trigger for me. I did love the descriptions of the English countryside and nature though, there was some beautiful quotes in this book.

Open, Heaven is the debut novel from the already much lauded poet Seán Hewitt. This is a beautiful elegy on love, a raw, queer coming of age tale that feels timeless yet so specific to a time and a place. The writing is utterly exquisite - you expect nothing less from a poet of Hewitt's skill.

James, our narrator, is remembering a year in his life twenty something years later, and this casts a nostalgic glow over proceedings, but also makes the love story at its heart feel more universal - it made me think of my own youthful loves and how they made me feel. If the responsibility of fiction is to move and to entertain, then Open, Heaven did both these things for me. I read this in one sitting it was that good.

Thanks to Netgalley and the publishers for the ARC.

I expect it's me rather than this book but I found it just a bit too archetypical: set over a glorious rural summer with ravishing descriptions of nature, the narrator, James, falls into excruciating first love with the older and troubled Luke.

James' desire is both physical and emotional, and a close adolescent friendship builds between the young men. The writing is lush and sensitive, there's a melancholy heatedness as James recalls this pivotal summer twenty years later. But I was, perhaps unfairly, left feeling this is a bit slight.

With gestures towards [book:The Go-Between|89900] for a kind of 'death of the heart' vibe, there's a strange timelessness that niggled: it's 2002 and no-one has a phone and the boys are reading porn magazines?

Ultimately, I found this a bit too neat and easy. The two young men love each other, but with different forms of love - and James is still thinking of Luke when he marries his husband.

A romantic, nostalgic piece that will prove popular, I expect, but I think I wanted something rawer and less finished than this.

Oh dear me. I already foresee that this is going to be one of my favourite books of the year.

It broke my fucking heart. Because it's raw, it's true, it's absolutely honest. I had NEVER read such brutal honesty in describing teenage angst and feelings especially around queerness. James will stay with me for such a long time.

This is not a romance. It's a love story that ends with learning that love is of different kinds. It's about learning to face their own desires, and how they make us feel. It's a absolutely heartbreaking depiction of masculinity, especially in teenage boys, and what they do to belong.

I absolutely loved this. I will be gifting it to a few friends and I will absolutely purchase the hardback when it comes out. Stunning stunning stunning.

Thank you Netgalley and Penguin for the arc!!

Beautiful debut novel about a young lad's coming of age and realisation and acceptance of his queerness. Gorgeous, poetic writing. Really moving story.

SEAN HEWITT – OPEN HEAVEN *****
This is an exquisite novel. His prose, descriptions of the village where he lived and loved as a boy, the seasons, remind me of the countryside descriptions of H E Bates at his most brilliant. The framing, the older man looking back at himself as a child, reminds me of the film of The Go Between. Talking of the village he returns to he says, “It was as though time had visited it just once, in the early nineteenth century.’
If you like explosions and car chases and high drama, this is not for you. This is an altogether different beast. Calm and measured on the surface, yet seething with passion and emotion underneath. Something Alan Hollinghurst might write. Has to be my most favourite book of the year.

From the first page to the very last I was held by Seán Hewitt’s stunningly beautiful writing in Open, Heaven. This is a tender, emotional coming out story. A story about love.

James is insecure, coming of age and coming out at 16. He lives rurally with his family. Just outside the village, teenager Luke arrives to stay with his uncle on a farm. Luke has confidence and a brazen attitude. His past is not without trouble.

What builds between James and Luke is a friendship, a comradery, and yes love. However, the love is unrequited. James’s desire is raw and intense, his painful yearning is angst filled. The writing is truly poetic and breathtaking. Even the author’s descriptions of the natural world, the forest, the sky, capturing the colours, the scents, are so profoundly written I felt there.

Open, Heaven left me in tears for the poignant beauty, the loss. For all that was and has passed, for all of us. It’s an outstanding book.

Thank you to Random House UK, Vintage and NetGalley for the arc in exchange for my honest review.

Open, Heaven by Sean Hewitt

When James Legh is scrolling through a collection of on line photos from the village where he grew up, he comes across a notice of auction of a farmhouse greatly significant to his teenage years. A subsequent visit stirs up memories,not just of place and time, but of the acknowledgment of coming out as gay and the awakening of first love. From the moment he first sees Luke, the emotions of desire and passion are so strong as to overwhelm his feelings toward anything else. Where these will lead creates a tension, almost thriller-like; consequences for James,defining his life and running deep.

This is a beautiful piece of writing, capturing the fire,tenderness and anxiety of youth. The recollections are framed in the wonderfully vivid colours of the seasons, cold winter to hazy green summer.

#docs.reading.room

Looking back to a year of momentous events on the cusp of adulthood, James goes back to the village of his childhood, the scene of his sexuality being laid bare for all to see where coming out seems to have exacerbated feelings of loneliness and otherness. His fantasies become focused on Luke, who is visiting a local farm, and has many problems of his own. There is great tenderness in the writing, though sometimes the introspection feels stifling, and we as readers long for some sort of redemption in the adult James making everything right for himself.

I loved every page of this masterful yet tender novel, about a young man looking back on a particular, pivotal moment in time, right on the cusp between boyhood and adulthood, and the boy he met who in many ways left him changed for life.

A lot of novels are termed as "coming of age", but there's something that really rings true about how James feels in his family, socially, and in himself that perfectly captures the last lingering rays of childhood and the fear of the unknown adult world that lies beyond. While the adult James looks back with rose tinted glasses at his old village and what is maybe the last summer he spent there, even those dreamy recollections are pre-echoed by some sort of anxiety or trepidation as to what might come next.

Everything about this idyllic country setting is rendered so beautifully, in such luscious, luxurious language that the everyday is elevated to something golden, untouchable, though somehow out of time, or behind glass. Falling in love bursts James's world right open, in many ways, but this obsession makes him withdrawn in other ways, pulling him away from the other anchors in his life, "ruining the life in front of him".

At a pre-launch event last month, Seán Hewitt said that he had wanted to explore what this kind of infatuation does to a person's imagination, and this idea is explored really interestingly in how the older narrator tells us how adult relationships, even his now failed marriage, paled to the vivid Technicolor of his time spent with Luke - and even at the time, he "was never really living, never inhabiting [his] days, because [he] saw them all as a prelude to something else". Love transforms James, but not in the way he might have thought, and Hewitt charts this on his interior landscape so poignantly.

For a novel so steeped in rapturous love, where every world drips with exquisite longing, it is also perfectly balanced, and even restrained, no more so than in the elegant, moving last pages that hit all the right notes, powerful without being overwrought, sweet while never being saccharine, nostalgic though tempered with reflection and reality. I can't praise Open, Heaven enough.

I thoroughly enjoyed Open, heaven. It really captured the naivety, doubts and insecurities of first love. A really mature insight into love between two boys. Great read

A slight, subtle novel that perfectly captures the experience of youthful desire. It’s very deft in how it handles the often obsessive nature of teenagers and the weight of those feelings at the time, but also acknowledges the ways in which they often feel unfinished.

(Open, Heaven will also be the subject of my March newsletter)

It's hard to articulate exactly what about this book got under my skin and stayed there, refusing to let go of me.

James is young, gay, and longs to escape the quiet country village he calls home. But he is too young to leave, and anyway his family needs him. Lonely and out of place he drifts through each day in the knowledge that he doesn't belong. Then Luke arrives. A little older, but also out of place in his own way. He has been sent to live on a farm with his aunt and uncle as his mother has left and his father is in prison. That summer, Luke and James meet. Over the next year they become part of one another's lives, and James falls in love in the intense, agonising way you do when it is the first time.

In the present, James returns to the village for a day. Just to look around. Just to be there. To sit with the destruction that this single year set in motion.

This is a masterful piece of work. Although it is short, this book leaves you shattered at the end, because every word of it feels so real. From the vivid description of an ordinary village to the wonder and pain of first love. It isn't a grand, hopeful story of finding a lost love or putting your life back together. It is raw and sad and wistful. I read it in less than a day because once I started I couldn't stop. I had to know, had to understand everything that had happened between these two people. What a book.

It is such a privilege to read a book like this.

Open Heaven by Sean Hewitt is a breathtakingly beautiful book. The writing is so lyrical and moving—it pulled me in from the start. There were moments that felt deeply familiar, especially as a gay man growing up, and I think many will relate to the emotional journey in this story. The characters are so lovable and real, and you can’t help but get attached to them. The book captures the quiet, sometimes painful beauty of coming into your own, and it left me feeling both heartbroken and hopeful. It’s a story that stays with you long after you’ve finished reading.

This is a sensitive and important analysis of the challenges posed by male adolescence.. James lives in a small village and has to work to help the family finances. He realises he fancies other male teenagers and knows that this revelation will make his family unhappy and result in him being a target at school. He is coping with all the other physical and mental changes of adolescence at the same time. He is shy too. Then he realises he is in love with Luke, who is slightly older but lives locally in better off circumstances. They have an on and off relationship which is carefully detailed in the book. This is a good read and analyses the challenges of growing up very effectively. Some readers might be deterred by the idea of two male teenagers in love but it is worth overcoming that. I recommend this book.

This book was beautifully written, but I found it rather difficult to enjoy. It felt unfinished. Nothing happened. I feel like it was really missing more, that none of what happened really explained why on Earth James would still be obsessed with Luke decades later. It made me uncomfortable

Beautifully written and full of angst: the young man coming out and falling in love, the sense that this love is both life-changing and out of reach, the changing relationship with his parents, the illness of his younger brother, all woven into the changing seasons of the English countryside. The final image is transcendent and unforgettable.

A profound love story, arresting in its pathos.

James, a shy 16 year old, lives with his parents and younger brother in a small village in the north of England. Lonely and aware his sexuality has isolated him from school friends, he’s made to help with an early morning milk round. Delivering to a nearby farm he meets Luke, who due to family circumstances has been sent to live there with his aunt and uncle.
Luke is bold, enigmatic and James falls deeply for him, but as the two boys grow closer he’s unsure of Luke’s feelings, as well as becoming increasingly resentful of family expectations.
Set over the course of one year this is a book about the gut-wrenching passion of first love and how it can shape the rest of your life.

Seán Hewitt has had considerable success as a poet, he has a real eye for nature and the changing seasons. This debut novel will deservedly further enhance his reputation.

Many thanks to NetGalley and Random House UK, Vintage for an ARC

Seán Hewitt is a poet, memoirist, novelist and literary critic – both his debut poetry collection “Tongues of Fire” (2020) and his memoir “All Down Darkness Wide” (2022) won literary prizes, and received multiple prize listings and by coincidence on the very day I started reading this (his debut novel) to be published later in 2025, his second poetry collection “Rapture’s Road” was longlisted for the prestigious Dylan Thomas Prize for writers under age 39. From what I understand his work is well known for its beautiful writing and for its thematic mingling of queer love with nature writing.

Thematically that is exactly what is covered in this book, and we know we are in the hands of a writer of beautiful sentences from the very opening paragraph of the book – one which also sets up the mind state of our narrator James (a librarian, living in the South of England) in 2022 as, shortly after the break up of his marriage (“my husband said that I could love him but not desire him”) he finds his mind turning back to a Summer in 2002 when he was sixteen and a putative relationship with a boy Luke, that was not just formative but whose memories (in his own words) even decades later derailed him and undid his life with his husband.

And in 2022, as he is searching rather obsessively on line for details of his home village (Thornmere in North England), he realises that the farmhouse where he first met Luke is for sale – and is drawn back to the village to try and somehow return to that Summer.

And in his thoughts and memories when he is there he does, and we travel with him as most of the rest of the novel is set in Thornmere in the Summer of 2002 – a village once some 200 years earlier the intersection of factories, industry, canals and railway – now little more than a time-frozen settlement hidden on a slip road off a motorway; again a beautifully crafted opening paragraph to the 2002 section reassuring us of the author’s literary gifts to conjure place as well as person.

James has come out both to his parents and school friends – something accepted but not really condoned (and not least in a family and village who have made a virtue if not almost life choice of both conservatism and of not standing out). James yearns to leave the village for the wider world, but is still at school and his hard-up parents (having also to cope with his rather fragile younger brother who suffers from unexplained fits) is dragooned into a milk round – where, on a village farm, he encounters Luke, the wayward nephew of the farmer.

Luke we find out over time has a mother who has remarried and moved to France and a father in jail – Luke himself perhaps inevitably has a reputation as a trouble maker himself (the apple does not fall far from the tree is the consensus) one he seems happy to live up to with a charismatic, impulsive almost cocky attitude to life, although as James and he get closer his occasional vulnerability becomes clearer to James as does the fact that precisely what James wants to escape (a stable, conservative family set up) is exactly what Luke desperately misses.

Much of the rest of the book maps out the ups and downs of their developing but often agonising friendship and James’s desperate yearning for it to become something more – all embedded in some beautiful nature writing, and some wonderfully observed writing on James dynamics with his family (particularly his mother, their fierce love making James’s increasing desire for independence painful to both).

Really there is so much to like in this book: at the sentence level (for example I loved how James described his 2002 dilemma of feeling unsure both of his parent’s acceptance of him and of Luke’s real feelings, saying it was “as though I lived in this hyphen now, at home in neither place, and wanted nowhere”; at the paragraph level (see the examples above); and in terms of the overall flow of the novel right up to the ending two sections (first of all in 2022 as James ends his return to Thornmere and then our return to 2002 as we see the end of the Summer and Luke’s visit to the village.

And all of this is played out against so more family drama and some closing paragraphs which both thematically mirror and in quality match the opening of the novel.

I had though perhaps two reservations with the novel which prevent me giving it the five stars I thought were inevitable from its opening salvos.

The first is that a word which springs to mind (and I have seen in other reviews) is its “timeless” portrayal of the English countryside, but the novel is timed (to early 21st Century) and yet to me seems to have been set (with the complete absence of mobile phones or computers and with a village milk round) perhaps a decade or more earlier. I am conscious that our first description of Thornmere describes it precisely as out of time, but this seemed to give the novel a lack of fidelity – although the 1990s born author grew up in Warrington so I may well be wrong, but it slightly bought me out of an immersive novel. Similarly I was unconvinced by the novel’s absolutely central conceit, that a still nascent relationship when sixteen would have such life long repercussions even overshadowing James’s wedding day (again though the author may be writing from experience).

So overall this is in many ways a brilliant book – some of the best writing I suspect I will read this year and one I would heartily recommend, just one that did not entirely convince me on a narrative rather than literary/poetic level.

But nevertheless one I would strongly recommend reading – if only to get ahead of the acclaim and prize listings that will surely and deservedly follow.