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Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt
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Open, Heaven

by Seán Hewitt
Due to publisher restrictions, this audiobook is unavailable for purchase in your selected country.
Length TBA
Language English
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Brought to you by Penguin.

Set in the English countryside, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year as two teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives.

On the cusp of adulthood, James dreams of another life far away from his small village. Beholden to the expectations of home and family, his burgeoning desire – an ache for autonomy, tenderness and sex – threatens to unravel his shy exterior.

Then he meets Luke. Unkempt and handsome, charismatic and impulsive, he has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on a nearby farm. Luke comes with a reputation for danger, yet underneath his bravado lie anxieties and hopes of his own.

As the seasons pass, and the pair form an ever-changing bond, James falls into a terrifying first love that will transform his life forever. Enthralling and richly immersive, Open, Heaven is a debut novel about the freedom of youth, the sacrifices of friendship, and the possibilities of love in all its forms.

‘It’s a novel about us’ KAVEH AKBAR

‘Hewitt writes with such tenderness and grace’ ANNE ENRIGHT

‘A beautiful novel about how a first love can shape a whole life’
HELEN MACDONALD

‘Open, Heaven does what the very best coming of age stories do’
MICHAEL MAGEE

‘Gorgeous…thrums with hidden love and concealed truths’
ANDREW McMILLAN

‘Intensely conjured…as bittersweet and elegiac as birdsong’
PATRICK GALE

© Seán Hewitt 2025 (P) Penguin Audio 2025

FictionRomanceLGBTQIA+ FictionFiction - Literary

Seán Hewitt was born in 1990. He is the author of two poetry collections, Tongues of Fire and Rapture’s Road, and a memoir, All Down Darkness Wide. He collaborated with the artist Luke Edward Hall on 300,000 Kisses: Tales of Queer Love from the Ancient World. Hewitt has received the Laurel Prize and the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and been shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. He lectures at Trinity College Dublin and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Audiobook details

Author
ISBN 9781529942507
Length TBA
Language English
Publisher Random House
Publication date
Edition Unabridged
Genres Fiction, Romance, LGBTQIA+ Fiction & Fiction - Literary
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Reviews

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 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 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 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 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 Expand reviews
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