Pure Colour
the new novel from the author of Motherhood and How Should A Person Be?
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- £7.99
Publisher Description
** SHORTLISTED FOR THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2023**
** WINNER OF THE 2022 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD IN FICTION**
Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The New Yorker, Vulture, The Times Literary Supplement, and more
What if this world is just a first draft, made by some great artist in order to be destroyed?
In this first draft, 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.
Pure Colour tells the story of a life, from beginning to end. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling and a shape-shifting epic that is celestially bright and streaked with beauty.
'Beautiful and impossible to put down. Sheila Heti is a genius.' Avni Doshi
'This one-of-a-kind novel... feels nothing less than vital.' Observer
'An original, a book that says something new for our difficult times.' Anne Enright, Guardian
'A treat.' Stylist
_______________________
PRAISE FOR SHEILA HETI:
'Exhilarating...it made me want to write' Sally Rooney, on How Should a Person Be?
'Sheila Heti has broken new ground' Rachel Cusk, on Motherhood
'Complex, artfully messy and hilarious' Miranda July, on How Should a Person Be?
'Thrilling, very funny, and almost unbearably moving' Garth Greenwell, on Motherhood
'Courageous, necessary, visionary' Elif Batuman, on Motherhood
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Heti (How Should a Person Be?) delivers an underwhelming fable, a sort of Generation X Jonathan Livingston Seagull. Here, God has created three kinds of people: bird, fish, and bear. Birds are ambitious, fish are socially minded, and bears love with focus and intensity. Mira, the main character, is a bird, born to a bear father, with whom she has an emotionally incestuous relationship. Annie, a fellow student at the American Academy of American Critics whom Mira has a crush on, is a fish. Heti romanticizes the characters' time in school, which apparently took place shortly before the advent of smartphones: "They just didn't consider the fact that one day they would be walking around with phones in the future, out of which people who had far more charisma than they did would let flow an endless stream of images and words." Mira is prone to overblown mysticism; after her father dies, she imagines she "felt his spirit ejaculate into her, like it was the entire universe coming into her body." Stricken by grief, she hopes for relief from Annie, though their contrasting animal natures complicate the relationship. Just what the point of it all is remains something of a mystery. Even Heti's fans will be flummoxed.
