BookBrowse Reviews Open, Heaven by Seán Hewitt

BookBrowse:

Over the course of one year in a small village in northern England, teenager James meets and becomes enamored with an older boy who moves to his town.

This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For access to our digital magazine, free books,and other benefits, become a member today.

Open, Heaven, the debut novel from Irish poet Seán Hewitt, opens with recent divorcé James returning to his hometown in northern England and contending with the intense memories his homecoming evokes. But it's not his marriage that he's thinking about—his ex-husband, who is never named, doesn't occupy much space in James's mind—it's an intense infatuation he had with another boy in his youth.

The narrative then shifts back to the early 2000s to tell that story. James and Luke meet when James is sixteen and Luke is a little older. James, who has always known that he's gay, has just come out to his family (who are reluctantly accepting) and a girl at school (who is very accepting, but soon tells all the other students, who are much less so). James is a social outcast until his morning milk delivery route takes him to a farm whose tenant has recently taken in his nephew, Luke. The quiet, rebellious Luke comes from a troubled background, and his parents are out of the picture for the next year. Since Luke doesn't attend the local school, James sees in him an opportunity to reinvent himself. The two become close, and although James's interest in Luke quickly devolves into more of an obsession, he is paralyzed by a fear of making the first move.

Open, Heaven is a sultry, atmospheric, lyrical novel that chronicles one boy's torturous infatuation. As a poet, Hewitt's strength lies in his command of the English language, where he draws the reader into James's internal world with beautifully wrought sentences that capture some poignant element of the human condition. It's hard not to feel for James, whose isolation and longing are palpable as he believes Luke is his only real chance at a meaningful human connection. As each of the novel's four chapters progresses—one set during each season—James's anxiety builds toward a breaking point:

"Our summer should have seemed open-ended. Almost every day was hot, with endless blue skies and the deep green of woods and meadows, but I knew that, before the autumn came around again, Luke would be gone. I lived in a limbo of disbelief. I never raised the subject, and there were days when I thought I could stop him, somehow, from leaving. Other days, I almost forgot that it might happen at all. And then there were hours that were almost unbearable because they were flooded with the awareness of an ending, a drawn-out goodbye, a terror of seeing Luke's father driving through the village to collect him and taking him away."

Is Luke gay too? Are all of James's fantasies reciprocated? These are the questions that Hewitt leaves just out of reach for the majority of the novel, creating a tantalizing enigma of a character whose allure is felt by the reader as much as by James.

Though it has shades of cult classic queer coming-of-age novels like Call Me By Your Name by Andre Aciman, Lie With Me by Philippe Besson, and Swimming in the Dark by Tomasz Jedrowski, Open, Heaven is a far more interior work. There are certain background plot elements, mostly involving James's home life and his younger epileptic brother to whom his parents devote all of their attention, but the majority of the book focuses solely on James's feelings about Luke. Consequently, it's rather slow-paced, and almost overly archetypal in its construction (the characters and situations at times feel more like abstractions than individuals), which could be a drawback in comparison to some of the above-mentioned novels that have stronger plotting. For the right reader who appreciates quieter emotional devastation, however, it's a beautiful gem.

This review was originally published in The BookBrowse Review in June 2025, and has been updated for the April 2026 edition. Click here to go to this issue.