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)

Exquisitely written... In both the rhythms of his sentences and what he relays, Hewitt places himself firmly in an established British literary tradition...Though a study of despair, the memoir is not despairing... His call, framed by the poets to whom he feels so profoundly connected, as well as by his own family, is radical, a fervent appeal for presence and belonging.

Harper’s Magazine, Claire Messud

Hewitt's book is excellent... It makes one hope this is the beginning of a wonderful trend of men writing about love with the same intense vulnerability that women have for decades now... [Hewitt] shows himself to be one of our foremost memoirists... A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon. Let us hope it is but a first volume, the beginning of a vast work.

Barry Pierce, Sunday Times

[An] extraordinary memoir... All Down Darkness Wide is not about answers. It does not offer glib consolations and is all the more powerful and affecting for that.

Kate Kellaway, Observer

A book glittering with beguiling detail... Discursive yet succinct, humane, unsparing of its author, All Down Darkness Wide will surely take its place alongside H is for Hawk as a hard-to-categorise memoir hybrid whose sales will catch fire through word-of-mouth recommendations.

Patrick Gale, Irish Times

An immense feat of both empathy and imagination.

Luke Warde, Sunday Independent

Rapturous... even his depictions of cruising have a holy aura. As a dedicated nonfiction writer, I sometimes meet poets' memoirs with a caginess that is utterly disgraced by a book like this, whose structure is nearly as immaculate as its sentences... Writing is always an act of translation, and Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own.

Melissa Febos, New York Times

[P]oignant and painful, rigorous and sensual... Hewitt has forged a life-enhancing memoir... This book stands alongside Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast as an outstanding chronicle of a gay poet's journey of self-discovery.

Michael Arditti, The Spectator

This stunning memoir of life as an outsider is told with empathy, intelligence and a mastery of language... a major talent... a space will need to be made on the Queer Classics shelf.

Paul McVeigh, The Irish Indepdent

A deeply personal account of growing up gay and lonely in Liverpool... Seán offers no resolutions or redemption, but in such achingly beautiful, resplendent writing on his darkest moments, we find hope.

Face, *Summer Reads of 2022*

A beautiful, vulnerable account... All Down Darkness Wide is a rich, moving memoir in which Hewitt reveals the loneliness of his early life, but also hope for his future yet to be written.

New Statesman

Exquisitely beautiful and powerful.

attitude

Some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years... intensely original.

Alexander Chee, The Atlantic

Hewitt's poetic sensibility gives this exploration of empathy a lovely long, and mature cadence. He is a very wise child indeed.

Anne Enright, Irish Times, Books of the Year 2022

I loved Seán Hewitt's moving memoir ... an insightful account.

Observer, *Christmas Gift Guide 2022*

An exceptionally generous act of storytelling, and his readers are the richer for it.

Skinny, *Books of the Year*

A stunning meditation on love and heartbreak, this feels like an essential work of the new Irish queer canon

Sunday Times

A remarkable memoir of love and sorrow

Observer

Intensely original... some of the most beautiful prose I've read in years

Alexander Chee, The Atlantic

We are witnessing the emergence of a major talent... stunning. A space will need to be made on the Queer Classics shelf

Irish Independent

Exquisitely written... a fervent appeal for presence and belonging

Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine