Clearly this is the work of a distinguished (if young) writer. And yet I found it a little lacking. Yes, it’s an intense account of young or first love, so profoundly felt as to indelibly mark the narrator’s life forever more. And yes, it’s delivered in sensitive prose that makes very clear the isolated, doomed nature of his sexuality and alienation. But I didn’t feel it, and I didn’t find it enough to sustain the whole novel. Should it have been a short story or a novella? Should it have had a postscript exploring what came after the visit to the hometown and vast flashback laying out what happened with Like?
I don’t know. I just found the material plausible yet repetitive and thereby diminished.

Another novel by a poet? Don’t mind if I do. And this debut didn’t disappoint, further proving that poets are superheroes.

Pub date April 14, 2025

The friendship and love between two teenage boys in the English countryside.

At first I was a bit bored by the set up: a mid 30’s man returning home to his village in the north of England, reminiscing about his first love. If this alone does it for you, then great! But if you’re like me and your initial reaction is, “Meh”, then just hear me out. This story is a slow burn that is well worth the wait. I don’t mean that there is some huge plot twist, but that Hewitt was able to unearth the nuances of male friendship, of crushes, of longing, and of loneliness in a way that I have just not seen done on the page. I’m so glad I held out.

I got Shuggie Bain and My Brilliant Friend vibes with this one. Emotional, dreamy, and timeless. A great short read.

Thank you @netgalley and @knopf for this e-ARC.

I loved Hewitt's writing in this. I adored his style and the way he crafted the narrative. I thought the prose flowed nicely and the emotions were so impactful. I twas a wonderful read and truly showed his talents

This was a wonderful book which I devoured, even more so than Hewitt's previous book. What a gifted writer, there was poetry in every line and it was heartbreaking. Who cannot relate to this kind of coming of age yearning?

Lyrical novel about a boy coming into his sexuality in a small village, young love, and sometimes, making the worst possible choices with the best of intentions, and the fallout. Pick this up when it comes out some next year if you want some great pining, and young love that's reflected back on in your later years.

Thank you to Netgalley and Knopf for the eARC!

I love when poets write fiction because every single sentence feels meticulously cared for. Seán Hewitt became an auto-buy author for me after I read his memoir, ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE, earlier this year. This is a stunning fictional debut that will speak to fans of ambient, tender queer burners like IN MEMORIAM, AT SWIM, TWO BOYS, and GOD’S OWN COUNTRY. Hewitt conveys teenage loneliness and desire with gripping narrative power amidst vivid descriptions of North English village life. His talent for emotive, immersive writing, for making you precisely feel as his characters do, is no small thing. I particularly admire writers who can create poignant and universal art out of commonplace and even unremarkable events, and that’s certainly the case with OPEN, HEAVEN — on its face, it’s a simple tale of a lonely teenage boy who falls for a straight boy who’s quite ordinary, but Hewitt makes you feel the all-consuming gravitas of adolescent love on the teetering brink of adulthood, as well as the heartbreaking desperation for queer belonging and sameness. This is ultimately a story about the transcendence of youthful first love, a purity and sublimity of feeling that eclipses anything you feel as an adult, and an inability to turn back the past and find that feeling again, or the version of yourself that was capable of feeling it. As someone who read Hewitt’s memoir, it felt at times like reading another memoir, which I think adds to the story’s verisimilitude and heart. Can't wait to recommend this to everyone I know!

This was a beautifully written novel about coming of age as a gay adolescent and experiencing first love/first obsession. It was a little slow for my personal taste, but it was easy to get lost in the English country setting and feel every excruciating feeling with the main character as they occurred throughout. I think a lot of young queer people experiencing these feelings for the first time will really enjoy this novel, as well as those who are older and are nostalgically looking back on their own lives.
Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for providing this arc in exchange for my honest review.

Living in a rural community in the north of England, James, in the process of haltingly exploring his own identity, often feels distant from his family and others his own age. He dreams of a life beyond the confines of his village. Then, he meets Luke, who has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on their farm near James's village. James is drawn to Luke, who feels his own distance from his family, and the two strike up a friendship, though James is often unsure of where he stands with Luke.

This is a perceptive and nuanced story about two people struggling with their place in the world and finding a connection with each other, even though the exact nature of that connection is often muddled.

Highly recommended.

Open, Heaven was a slow-paced book written with gorgeous and melancholic prose. It was tender, sweet, and full of so much young gay yearning. James’ push and pull between his desires, his loneliness, and his home life was so well conveyed over the course of this book. During some moments while reading this understood James a little too well. Poets who write novels will always blow me away.

Thank you Netgalley and the publisher for letting me read this in exchange for an honest review.

this is so… i cannot put my hand on it but my god did it feel like home
this is an arc i got from netgalley and the publisher (thank u for accepting my request by the way) and the review is my own
you know how life feels extra hard when you know you’re different? this is an ode to that
to love to friendships to being different and thinking you’re unloved yet you probably are loved so much beyond belief
the sorrows of my teenage years have not left me yet because i have not left my abusive childhood home but one day i will
it’s nice to see life from other perspectives
alsooo the writing style was so much fun, very easy to go through finished it so fast i’m actually regretting this now.
the forget me nots actually are my favorite flowers ever so this is the reason this book was given a complete 5 stars!

Wow! What a read. This is very much a coming of age novel and discovering your queerness. The longing that James has for Luke feels so reminiscent of the first time you really fall for someone. It is so well described. The book did keep me at the edge of my seat, and at the end almost brought me to tears. What a beautiful story.

I loved the author's memoir "All Down Darkness Wide" and so I was very excited to read his first novel. I was not disappointed. Two sixteen year-old boys have a fraught romantic entanglement in an English village in the early 2000s. It is a beautiful story of first love, powerfully told. The prose is exceptional. This book had me in my feelings the whole time. I will be getting this book for numerous bookish friends of mine when it comes out. I am honored that I got a chance to read this book early.

Open, Heaven is an incredibly immersive and poetic novel that follows sixteen year old James as he struggles through understanding himself and his queerness. The strongest part of this novel is the prose - I constantly found myself highlighting and rereading lines. The writing is just absolutely beautiful, begs to be devoured, and emotional without being overbearing or complicated.

Our main character James is the focus of this character study, and while there is definitely plot in this novel as well, it comes second to James's over-analyzation of everything happening around him. I found his internal monologuing to feel redundant at times, but it absolutely brought me back to my own adolescence and how easy it was to think about one thing (or one person) again and again and again and again (and again).

As others have said, this novel reminded me of 'Call Me by Your Name' and 'Swimming in the Dark'. If you liked either of those novels then I would highly recommend this book. Or, if you want to be thrown back into adolescent obsession, I would also highly recommend this book. If you want a fast-moving, swoon worthy romance, then I would look for something else.

Thank you to Netgalley for the eARC!

This post contains spoilers. Feel free to skip them and come back when you’ve experienced the book for yourself. I’ve marked where the spoilers begin and end with this symbol: *.

Comparisons are going to be made that this book is like Call Me By Your Name, Lie With Me, Swimming in the Dark, and other queer books that like to wade around in those murky, gray areas. Don’t get me wrong, I resist binary thinking, and as a queer person see it as genuinely harmful to the future of our community, but I don’t really like those books much for the same reason I’m having a hard time liking this one.

My feelings around books about unfulfilled queer desire, books that end with a return to heteronormativity, or books about the death of a queer person, are, to say the least, complex. While I do believe queer stories of all kinds should be told and allowed to exist, I think it’s also important to turn a critical eye toward what exactly is being perpetuated by these types of stories we tell.

Real stress and trauma is experienced by queers because of their loneliness, their longings, and their unmet desires. It is held in their minds and bodies, it is a real reality that will forever shape how they relate to others and to the world. It seems to be a common experience among queer people that we have less freedom as cis and straight people do to act out our desires because everything in our lives is shaped by the compulsory ideal of creating the perfect family unit, of finding that one person, of getting married and living happily-ever-after, despite the fact that there are other potentially more liberating ways of existing in the world.

*Here’s where the spoilers start.*

I struggle most with the ending of this book, its last two sections in particular. By the end, James does not seem like an individual with a strong sense of his own identity, he has no community or collective sense of belonging, and instead of returning to the clearing where he and Luke camped for the night after they ran away, he “reluctantly” merges and disappears driving among the other cars on the freeway and we are left wondering what exactly to make of what has just happened.

And that’s just it, he disappears. It’s as if queerness and all its complexities, its nuances, its different ways of being, once again leads to conformity, to assimilation, to this constant state of forever driving toward something we are not allowed to truly have fulfilled: desire. It is loneliness as an inevitable ending, and I refuse to believe that this is true for queer people. He does not take a different route, a different road, he has nothing left but to do what everyone else is doing, and that is to follow along.

While this isn’t where the book actually ends, it’s where it ends for James as an adult. The book switches back one final time to him as a teenager, saying goodbye to Luke at the end of the summer, longing for the impression Luke has just pressed into his hand, listening to church bells ring out into the sky.

And I think that says a lot about what this book is about: the institutions we as queer people are surrounded by, influenced by, and ultimately, I would argue, need to question and to resist.

This is not to say that I think that in order for this book to be “good” that James as a character must end up in a romantic relationship with Luke, that Luke must be something he is not, but rather to say that if this book was trying to offer an alternative to traditional structures of desire and longing (marriage, heteronormativity, an institution), it doesn’t seem to achieve that. James is not even friends with Luke as an adult, he is overwhelmed by his lasting desire for him, his longing for him still largely unfulfilled. An alternative relationship that could have fulfilled in some ways those unmet queer desires, perhaps a queerplatonic friendship, does not endure into adulthood.

*Here’s where the spoilers end.*

Reading is subjective, though, and I feel a lot of people will like this book. I just hope they think about its implications.

This book was really good at creating that tension of will-they-won’t-they, and the writing was full of momentum and gorgeous, poetic descriptions. It captures a great deal of the complexity of queer desire, longing, and sexual awakening but I would argue it doesn’t offer alternatives to heteronormative relationships.

Thanks to NetGalley and Knopf for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

This book really sinks into your cushioned heart and pulls out the nearly forgotten bits of youthful pain and hope and longing. Open, Heaven is beautifully lyrical as it dives into the vivid emotional life of a young man experiencing his first love. I felt the book mirrored, in some ways, Virginia Woolf's languid stream of consciousness style of evoking both place and feeling. Sean Hewitt's brightly descriptive sense of place enhances the imaginative emotions expressed by the young protagonist. Since it's not yet published, I won't quote from it, but if I did, it would be so hard to choose from the many images that stung my heart.

Seán Hewitt’s Open, Heaven is a lyrical and emotionally resonant coming-of-age novel set in a remote village in northern England. It tells the story of James, a shy sixteen-year-old boy grappling with his newly discovered sexuality and a deep yearning for a life beyond the boundaries of his insular community. Through a poetic and reflective narrative, Hewitt delves into themes of identity, desire, and the complexities of first love.

James is an introspective and sheltered character, whose internal journey of self-discovery forms the heart of the novel. Hewitt beautifully captures James’s struggle as he begins to understand his desires and how they threaten to separate him from the family and rural community he’s grown up in. His longing for tenderness, intimacy, and a life beyond the confines of his small world is palpable. James’s emotional turmoil feels raw and authentic, making him a relatable and sympathetic protagonist.

When James meets Luke, an older boy with a reputation for danger, the novel shifts into an exploration of the transformative power of first love. Luke, handsome and impulsive, is an enigmatic character with his own emotional wounds. Abandoned by his parents and sent to live with his aunt and uncle, Luke’s bravado masks a deep longing for love and stability, particularly from his imprisoned father. The chemistry between James and Luke is immediate and electric, drawing James into an intense relationship that transforms them both.

Hewitt’s writing is deeply atmospheric, using the natural beauty and isolation of the rural setting to mirror the emotional lives of the characters. The changing seasons—particularly the autumn of 2002 when James and Luke first meet—serve as a backdrop to the unfolding romance, adding layers of meaning and symbolism to their connection. The rural setting enhances the sense of isolation, both physical and emotional, that James feels as he grapples with his identity.

The relationship between James and Luke is filled with tenderness and tension, as both boys navigate their desires and fears. Hewitt skillfully portrays the fragility of first love, the fear of discovery, and the intensity of youthful passion. Their bond is both beautiful and precarious, fraught with the weight of their personal struggles. The novel doesn’t shy away from the darker aspects of their relationship, touching on issues of abandonment, longing, and the emotional toll of trying to find one’s place in a world that feels alien.

One of the novel’s strengths is its exploration of how both boys’ backgrounds shape their relationship. Luke’s turbulent family life and his attempts to hide his vulnerability from James add complexity to his character, while James’s sheltered upbringing makes him both deeply curious and fearful of the world Luke represents. Their relationship is a delicate balance of desire, emotional need, and self-discovery.

If there’s a critique to be made, it’s that the novel’s pacing can sometimes feel slow, particularly as it delves deeply into James’s introspection. For readers who enjoy character-driven stories and poetic prose, this will likely enhance the experience, but others may find the plot progression a bit too languid. The focus is primarily on the inner lives of the characters, with external events taking a backseat to the emotional development of the story.

Final Thoughts:
Open, Heaven is a beautifully written, introspective novel that captures the intensity of first love and the painful process of self-discovery. Seán Hewitt’s evocative prose and his nuanced portrayal of James and Luke’s relationship make this a deeply moving and emotionally rich story. While the pacing may feel slow at times, the novel’s atmosphere and emotional depth

I went into *Open, Heaven* not knowing what to expect, and I came out completely moved. Seán Hewitt’s writing is stunning, effortlessly poetic without ever losing the raw emotion behind the story. I was drawn in from the first page and found myself unable to put the book down. James, the protagonist, is so vividly portrayed that you can’t help but feel everything he’s going through—the yearning, the heartbreak, the confusion of being young and in love. It’s rare to find a book that captures the intensity of first love with such tenderness and honesty.

Hewitt does a phenomenal job exploring themes of identity, desire, and the painful journey of growing up, especially within a small, restrictive environment. The writing itself is nothing short of beautiful, but it never overshadows the emotional depth of the characters. It reminded me of why I love reading in the first place—when a story makes you feel like you’re not just reading about a character, but living their experience.

This book left a mark on me, and I know it’s going to stick with me for a long time. Absolutely a must-read.

Thank you to NetGalley and Knopf for providing this ARC!

I loved this book. It is so beautifully written, I liked the prose. Very evocative. A heart-wrenching portrait of young love and sexual awakening. Unlike what I usually read but I’m glad I gave it a shot. I would highly recommend this book and it will stick with me. The characters are very vivid and due to the first person narration you feel like you are experiencing it all with James.

Thanks to the publisher and Netgalley for this e-arc. All opinions are my own!

Not my favorite, but I think this will be a popular pick for some of our patrons. Very poetic, lovely writing style. Will be getting a copy.

I'm almost not sure how to review this novel, except to say that I have just finished something extraordinary. Hewitt's poetry is bold, inventive and personal, his memoir, 'All Down Darkness Wide' was an incredibly moving and spectacular piece of writing. 'Open, Heaven', somehow exceeds all expectations as Hewitt delivers one of the most agonisingly beautiful novel's I have ever read.