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Sean Hewitt's debut novel a tender, precise coming-of-age tale
The Straits Times
|April 20, 2025
First loves are the most delicate feats to pull off — even more so if they are of the queer kind.
OPEN, HEAVEN By Sean Hewitt Fiction/Jonathan Cape/ 208 pages/$29.49 ★★★★★
Timorous and all-consuming, they breathe in the shadow of societal stigma as well as their own personal demons.
The venture is riskier when penned from the first person's point of view, from the subject's understanding of his or her ardor and utter helplessness.
Anglo-Irish poet Sean Hewitt's debut novel Open, Heaven ticks all those boxes dutifully.
It is a coming of age, all right, with a premise as old as the Rosetta Stone's: 30something James returns to his village of Thornmere in northern England after his own marriage breaks down, to relive the memory of one year spent with the source of his infatuation from 20 years ago, a troubled older teen Luke.
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