All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir

All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir - Hardcover

$28.00
$28.00
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All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir
  • All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir
All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir - Hardcover

All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir - Hardcover

by Seán Hewitt
$28.00
$28.00

Book Overview

Winner of the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature - Named a Best Book of 2022 by Kirkus, Booklist, and Shelf Awareness - Named a Best Book of July by Buzzfeed - A Publishers Weekly Best Nonfiction 2022 Summer Read - Observer Book of the Week - Lammy Finalist

"The most beautiful prose I've read in years."--Alexander Chee, The Atlantic - "Rapturous...Hewitt beautifully illuminates his own darknesses so that we might also see our own."--Melissa Febos, The New York Times Book Review - "Exquisitely written."--Claire Messud, Harper's Magazine

When Seán Hewitt meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe mental illness, they soon come face-to-face with crisis.

All Down Darkness Wide is a perceptive and unflinching meditation on the burden of living in a world that too often sets happiness and queer life at odds, and a tender and honest portrayal of what it's like to be caught in the undertow of a loved one's deep depression. As lives are made and unmade, this memoir asks what love can endure and what it cannot.

Delving into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures before him, Hewitt plumbs the darkness in search of answers. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to a sacred grotto in the Pyrenees, it is a journey of lonely discovery followed by the light of community. Haunted by the rites of Catholicism and spectres of shame, it is nevertheless marked by an insistent search for beauty.

Hewitt captures transcendent moments in nature with exquisite lyricism, honours the power of reciprocated desire and provides a master class in the incredible force of unsparing specificity. All Down Darkness Wide illuminates a path ahead for queer literature and for the literature of heartbreak, striking a piercing and resonant chord for all who trace Hewitt's dauntless footsteps.
ISBN9780593300084
Author Seán Hewitt
PublisherPenguin Press
GenreBiography and Relationships
FormatHardcover
PublishedJuly 2022
LanguageENG- English
Pages240
Weight1.0 lb
Target AudienceAdults
Print SizeStandard Print

Related Subjects

Biography & Autobiography Family & Relationships Nonfiction

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More by Seán Hewitt

All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir

All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir - Hardcover

All Down Darkness Wide: A Memoir - Hardcover

By Seán Hewitt

About Seán Hewitt

SEÁN HEWITT's debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, won the Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, and a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times (London) as one of their "30 under 30" artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, is published by Jonathan Cape in the UK and Penguin Press in the United States (2022). It was shortlisted for Biography of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards, for the Foyles Book of the Year in nonfiction, for the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and for a LAMBDA award, and won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature in 2022. Hewitt is assistant professor in literary practice at Trinity College Dublin, and is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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