An exquisite tale of first love… Hewitt’s depiction of an enthralled and uncertain love is painfully convincing… Hewitt is superb in his loving and acute depictions of the natural world
SARAH PERRY
Guardian
Heart-rending…sensuous and decadent… Hewitt’s wistful, reverie-like writing captures the painful queer experience of confusing friendship for romantic love
Financial Times
A mature and complete debut novel… Hewitt’s poetic facility makes easy music of his atmosphere. The central relationship occurs by light, sensitive touch, and reaches arresting emotional depths
New Statesman
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
ANNE ENRIGHT, Booker Prize-winning author of The Wren, The Wren 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
KAVEH AKBAR, New York Times bestselling author of Martyr! 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
MICHAEL MAGEE, author of Close to Home 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
HELEN MACDONALD, author of H is for Hawk I loved it . . . Open, Heaven is a beautiful, lyrical and tender novel of youthful passion and the longing for connection. Hewitt’s debut is one to savour
FERDIA LENNON, author of Glorious Exploits 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
BRANDON TAYLOR, author of Real Life and The Late Americans Piercing and intimate, euphoric and elegiac – Open, Heaven is a gorgeous ache of a novel, an exquisitely told story whose characters linger long after you’ve closed the covers.
COLIN WALSH, author of Kala A story about the agony and ecstasy of first love
BBC, ‘The most exciting books to read in 2025’
A gorgeous debut; perfectly encapsulates the dirt and muck of urgent adolescent desire – a novel that thrums with hidden love and concealed truths, it takes the hand of the reader and walks with them through the isolated village of the young queer self
ANDREW McMILLAN, author of Pity and Physical Open, Heaven is a striking debut novel from a richly gifted poet and memoirist: an intensely conjured portrayal of the hopeless, all-consuming love of one lonely teenager for another and how it marks him for life. As in Hewitt’s poetry, the beauties of nature erupt throughout, seeming to express the things the two boys cannot voice and the cumulative effect is as bittersweet and elegiac as birdsong
PATRICK GALE, author of Notes from an Exhibition Superb… Anchored by a grounded sense of place and the universal theme of adolescent longing, Hewitt’s narrative strikes a resonant chord. It’s a stunner
Publishers Weekly
A page-turning tale of a first love, Open, Heaven is so tenderly written, so exquisitely crafted. The writing halts time and gives us a visceral sense of this life-changing experience. A wonderful debut
MONIQUE ROFFEY, author of The Mermaid of Black Conch