Early in Open, Heaven, James, a gay librarian in his mid-thirties, is told something by his departing husband that he immediately acknowledges as true. James may love his husband, but he does not desire him. For James, no lover has ever had the power of Luke, the boy he loved when he was sixteen: ‘Every time I looked into a lover’s eyes … I wanted to see Luke’s eyes, green and urgent, holding me.’ His experience with Luke has set ‘the pattern of all my subsequent longings’.

Much of the novel is formed of flashbacks, spotlighting the origins of James’s adult neurosis. But the writing is a model of restraint; much is left implicit, and the text, alternately bracing and poeticised, provides neither explanation nor diagnosis. The young James we see in the flashbacks is shy and prone to unhealthy levels of introspection. He lives in a remote English village where the 21st century appears barely to have arrived and there is little to fill the days but longing. His sexuality is known at school and to his parents. It arouses little overt hostility but is treated without sympathy or understanding. James’s family has its share of problems: his little brother, Eddie, suffers from mysterious seizures, any one of which might kill him. When the charismatic Luke arrives to live on a nearby farm, his troubled past and wrong ’un of a father make him a figure of glamour and the focus of James’s yearnings.

Authors of gay fiction have long found the situation of the sensitive teenager irresistible. Open, Heaven most closely resembles Adam Mars-Jones’s novella Box Hill (2020), which also explores the origins of a lifelong habit of self-­abasement. But unlike the protagonist of that book, Hewitt’s James appears incapable of leaving the