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Open, Heaven: A Novel - Softcover

Hewitt, Seán

 
9780593688847: Open, Heaven: A Novel
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0593688848 ISBN 13: 9780593688847
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2026

Inhaltsangabe

A stunning novel from the acclaimed young Irish poet Seán Hewitt, a luminous and intensely evocative portrayal of two teeneagers bonding with each other over one heady, transformative year.

"[Open, Heaven] 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, author of Martyr!


Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives.

James—a sheltered, shy sixteen-year-old—is alone in his newly discovered sexuality, full of an unruly desire but entirely inexperienced. As he is beginning to understand himself and his longings, he also realizes how his feelings threaten to separate him from his family and the rural community he has grown up in. He dreams of another life, fantasizing about what lies beyond the village’s leaf-ribboned boundaries, beyond his reach: autonomy, tenderness, sex. Then, in the autumn of 2002, he meets Luke, a slightly older boy, handsome, unkempt, who comes with a reputation for danger. Abandoned by his parents—his father imprisoned, and his mother having moved to France for another man—Luke has been sent to live with his aunt and uncle on their farm just outside the village. James is immediately drawn to him "like the pull a fire makes on the air, dragging things into it and blazing them into its hot, white centre," drawn to this boy who is beautiful and impulsive, charismatic, troubled. But underneath Luke’s bravado is a deep wound—a longing for the love of his father and for the stability of family life.

Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

SEÁN HEWITT's debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, won the Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times (London) as one of their “30 under 30”  artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the United States (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in nonfiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and for a LAMBDA award, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. Hewitt is assistant professor in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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2002

Autumn

I knew Thornmere was not like other places – the cities I saw on television, their buildings and roads rising and falling, or the towns around us gone ruinous after the factories closed. It was as though time had visited it just once, in the early nineteenth century. Like some industrious bird, it had busied itself there a little while, and then had flown the nest. In its wake, on its way to more interesting places, it had left the white cottages snug in a nest of canals and towpaths. The station house of the old railway, abandoned at the far edge of the village, stood now presiding over nothing but a narrow, submerged lane fragrant with buddleia and with elderflower. The village, in fact, appeared all the more swaddled for these occasional traces of industry, and from what could be spied beyond its southern perimeter: a power plant, a detergent factory, a twenty-four-hour supermarket. Thornmere’s outer reaches were crossed over by two motorway viaducts – people were always passing by, but not stopping. As far as I was concerned, it was nowhere’s junction and no one’s destination. Only the vague hum of distant traffic, and the graffitied undersides of the far canal bridges, gave any hint of a more virile life beyond.

Most of Thornmere’s five hundred or so houses were occluded by the treeline, so as the summer months came there was a sense that the village was slowly hiding itself, retreating stealthily into a lush covert. In those months, it was like a coin dropped into a field of tall grass – found occasionally by the winking sun, or stumbled across by an unlikely passer-by. No new houses had been built there for decades, and there had been no additions to the circular arrangement of the streets. Having lived there my whole life to this point, I knew all of its small passageways by heart. I could have walked from one side of the village to the other blindfolded. I knew each tree, each garden, each car on each street, each slipaway through the alleys and the broken fences. The canals, of which we had two, were my secret thoroughfares. I have never since felt so much like I owned a place; or, rather, like I was owned by it.

Time’s flight, however, went some way to explain the stagnation of the people who lived there. The millennium had come and gone, but the people looked back over the past century and saw only the apparently glorious punctuations of the two world wars. It was as if every day, for them, was a battle against the modern world. They clung to the village’s old festivals – the rush-bearing, the May Queen, the harvest – and found safety, or anchorage, in them. Change had come once and had left the people comfortable and ensconced. Like sober victors at a gambling table, they preferred not to risk their luck a second time.

This was how it was after I came out to my parents, too. In the quiet idyll of the village, I was the rupture, the punctum in the landscape. It wasn’t so much that either of them cared, or let on that they cared after the initial shock. It was the awkwardness of their friends; of Sylvia, who ran the post office; of the strangers who seemed to know me all of a sudden, though I had never spoken to them before. I knew how far the news had spread by the almost imperceptible difference between the way I was treated before and after. No one really said anything, but I could feel the tension around me, as though I would have to be rehabilitated in their eyes. In the end, I found that I didn’t have the energy for it, all the politeness, the humbleness I would have to show before I had a hope of being forgiven.

Perhaps my parents felt the same, and they also fell into a shamed silence, not wanting to stand out any more than they did now that I had attracted the pity and discomfort of their friends. They worried about me, but their worry only made me feel worse. They had chosen me over the village, and now I couldn’t be anything but perfect. In my mind, though, it was as though a veil had been lifted. Why things were the way they were, why some things were praised and others scorned, began to seem less and less a fact of life, and more and more like a collective hallucination. The pretence of childhood was gone, and the pretence of innocence with it. I had upturned their life, and then I had closed down, shutting them out, whether to protect myself or to protect them, I’m not sure. Then so much time passed that neither they nor I was able to puncture the silence. They knew I was gay, but that was as much as I told them; that is, until that year and the indignance caught up with me. I could not reconcile myself with the village, which suddenly seemed hypocritical and conservative, and I wanted everyone around me, including my parents, to see it. Because I did not feel at home anymore, I had begun to turn against it.

Towards the start of that school year, my father had come back from the pub on a Thursday evening and said that he had good news. We had hardly spoken for weeks, and he seemed glad to have lighted on an opportunity to break the awkwardness. His friend David was our milkman, and the boy who had used to help him with the morning rounds, my father told me, had broken his collarbone. ‘Rollerblades,’ my father said. He smiled, as if this explained everything, and then left a pause. I had no idea what he was talking about.

‘Good,’ he said, after a few seconds, though I hadn’t replied or made any conscious gesture. I could see that he was hurt by my not responding, but I didn’t know what to say, and a sternness came back over him.

‘Well, it’ll save us money, anyway, now that you can pay for your own dinners at school. You can call David tomorrow.’

It was in the slip of the unsaid that evening that I found myself being hauled out of my bed at 5:00 a.m. the following Monday to begin my first job. At the time, it was nothing but another indignity on the road to the adult world, something that ingrained my sense of being beholden to the family, to the village. I didn’t know, then, that it might be something else, the cause of a new hope; that it would lead me, bleary-eyed, to Luke.

On that first morning, I could see my breath in the still-dark bedroom; the windows, when I drew the curtains open, had lace patterns of an early frost around the edges, and the glass had bloomed in the centre with a milky condensation. It wasn’t usually this cold in late September, though the fields surrounding the village had a tendency to hold the night air longer than other places. There was a peach-coloured light outside, and the garden was still and silent. I pulled my old bike, which was covered in a layer of sawdust, out of the shed. I picked the loose, rusted chain back onto its spines, and cycled, half asleep, down the lanes to the crossroads nearest the motorway, where David was supposed to pick me up.

There were two big horse-chestnut trees there, at the entrance to the village, just past the sign that said Thornmere. They looked like guardians, towering and stooping on either side of the road. That morning, the spiked green shells were just about heavy enough for the occasional gust of wind to send a few falling down from the branches. They battered onto the roofs of cars and onto the tarmac and split open into perfect clean halves. I had locked my bike to a fence nearby, and was standing back from the trees, looking up nervously at them.

After a few minutes, I saw the milk float come heavily around the bend, and David called out to me as he slowed to a stop on the roadside. When the wheels bumped the kerb, the milk bottles in the back chimed precariously. David was in his early forties, and wore the same blue work jacket and pair of scuffed cargo trousers every morning. I thought I...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2026
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0593688848
ISBN 13 
9780593688847
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
225
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