All Down Darkness Wide

Seán Hewitt's book is a beautiful, complex and textured meditation on love, on growing up gay, on becoming a poet and on inhabiting Northern landscapes in winter. His account of falling in love and being in love is honest and vivid... I was engrossed, hardly looking up as I read. I woke in the morning fully enclosed by it, as though I had been dreaming it.

Colm Tóibín, author of THE MAGICIAN

It's a book that lures you in with the beauty of its prose, the poetic images that linger hauntingly in the mind for long afterwards. Difficult stories of mental illness, repression, and self-denial are transfigured into something defiant and life-affirming.

Charlie Gilmour, author of FEATHERHOOD

The book in your hands is a precious, living thing, each page alive with ache and with love, with truth and with tenderness. [A] writer whose work will continue to be treasured long after our lifetimes. A wonder.

Doireann Ní Ghríofa, author of A GHOST IN THE THROAT

All Down Darkness Wide is a searing and sublime account of the scars left by intolerance and how they shape a self. Hewitt's gorgeous prose gleams like a dayspring in the dimness, his story lingering long after the book is closed.

Melissa Harrison, author of ALL AMONG THE BARLEY

Gorgeous and moving prose that excavates the deep complexities of grief, shame and love with a tenderness and lightness of touch that makes the words sing.

Andrew McMillan, author of PHYSICAL

A wondrous act of recollection: flickering yet sonorous, elemental, humid, full of ache, flecked with ironic comedy. Hewitt makes shimmering magic from shame and shyness... This book arrives as if it was there all along, foxed and dog-eared from the first page.

Jeremy Atherton Lin, author of GAY BAR

It's impossible not to be intensely moved by this book, written with a poet's eye for detail... His memoir of queer discovery, loves found and lost, the past that we carry with us, and ultimately of becoming, feels like a future classic.

Niven Govinden, author of DIARY OF A FILM

Luminous and utterly original, a book with its own darkly beautiful gravity. I can't think of anything I have read like it - in terms of style and sensibility, and emotional daring.

Niamh Campbell, author of THIS HAPPY

Raw and hypnotic... Hewitt crafts a moving story of salvation, as he charts his path out of darkness and into self-acceptance. It's an exquisite vision of queer heartbreak and liberation.

Publishers Weekly

Seán Hewitt's memoir is extraordinarily beautiful... moving, and humane; it is the best new work of non-fiction I've read in years.

Sarah Perry, author of THE ESSEX SERPENT

[A] very beautiful, very intelligent book. It is of course a moving portrait of very human fragilities, but it also testifies to the power of the heart and mind to survive all kinds of grief and emerge with much of value to say to the world.

Okechukwu Nzelu, author of HERE AGAIN NOW

Stunning... This memoir is a heartbreaking disquisition on 'ghosts' like Hopkins and on the unattainability of permanence, and it features one beautiful scene after another... A profoundly moving meditation on queer identity, mental illness, and the fragility of life.

Kirkus (starred review)

[A] remarkable book, haunting... extraordinary and simply unforgettable.

Booklist (starred review)

This book bears reading twice it is so beautiful. Readers seeking an elegant, profound memoir will find none better than this. Highly recommended.

Library Journal (starred review)