Sheila Heti’s most formally adventurous novel yet—a book about death and rebirth, about loss and its hidden gifts, about God, middle age, and friendship, set “in the world behind this world.”

PURE COLOUR
by Sheila Heti
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, February 2022
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

The world is failing to remain a world. It is coming apart. The ice cubes are melting. Species are dying. People, too―of different things. But what if this world is just a first draft, made by some great artist in order to be destroyed? In this first draft of the world, 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 his spirit passes into her. Together, they become a leaf on a tree. But photosynthesis gets boring and being alive is a problem that cannot be solved, even by a leaf. Eventually, Mira must remember the human world she’s left behind, including Annie, and choose whether or not to return.
PURE COLOUR is a galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and an absurdly funny guide to the great (and terrible) things about being alive. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

Sheila Heti is the author of several books of fiction and nonfiction, including How Should a Person Be?, which New York Magazine deemed one of the “New Classics of the 21st century. » She was named one of « The New Vanguard » by The New York Times book critics, who, along with a dozen other magazines and newspapers, chose Motherhood as a top book of 2018. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.