All Down Darkness Wide

By turns painful and soaring, an ambitious memoir debut from one of Irish literature's rising stars, Seán Hewitt

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.

From a sacred grotto in the Pyrenees, to a 19th-century cemetery in Liverpool, this book traverses wide territories and times. Haunted by the rites of Catholicism and specters of shame, it is nevertheless marked by an insistent search for light.

Hewitt's voice is alive to hidden corners of beauty as only a poet's can be. He captures transcendent moments in nature with exquisite lyricism, and provides a masterclass in the incredible power of unsparing specificity. ALL DOWN DARKNESS WIDE illuminates a path ahead for queer literature and for the literature of heartbreak, and strikes a piercing and resonant chord for all who trace Hewitt's dauntless footsteps.