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  • Published: 12 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9781787302815
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $32.99

Pure Colour




Heartbreaking, exciting, profound: a short epic that reimagines what the novel can do

Heartbreaking, exciting, profound: a short epic that reimagines what the novel can do

After God created the heavens and the earth, he stood back to contemplate creation, like a painter standing back from the canvas. This is the moment we are living in - the moment of God standing back.

In this first draft of existence, a woman named Mira leaves home to study. There, she meets Annie, whose tremendous power opens Mira's chest like a portal - to what, she doesn't know. When Mira is older, her beloved father dies, and she enters that strange and dizzying dimension that true loss opens up.

This is a book about the shape of a life, from beginning to end. It's about art, critics, and ageing. It's about the surrounding world - sky, trees, lakes, stars - and 'the world beyond this world', which can be glimpsed in rare moments when something shattering occurs.

Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It's a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and its shape-shifting, mystical form allows us to take in the whole world in one glance. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

  • Published: 12 April 2022
  • ISBN: 9781787302815
  • Imprint: Harvill Secker
  • Format: Trade Paperback
  • Pages: 224
  • RRP: $32.99

About the author

Sheila Heti

Sheila Heti is the author of seven books, including the critically acclaimed How Should a Person Be? and is co-editor of the New York Times bestseller, Women in Clothes. She is the former interviews editor at The Believer magazine, and has been published in the New Yorker, the London Review of Books, McSweeney’s, Harper's and n+1. Her work has been translated into adozen languages. She lives in Toronto.

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Praise for Pure Colour

Sheila Heti has broken new ground

Rachel Cusk on MOTHERHOOD

Thrilling, very funny, and almost unbearably moving

Garth Greenwell on MOTHERHOOD

Complex, artfully messy and hilarious

Miranda July on HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?

Exhilarating... it made me want to write

Sally Rooney on HOW SHOULD A PERSON BE?

Courageous, necessary, visionary

Elif Batuman on MOTHERHOOD