Pure Colour

By: Sheila Heti

Narrated by: Sheila Heti

Brought to you by Penguin.

A new novel about art, love, loss and time from the author of Motherhood and How Should A Person Be?

Here we are, just living in the first draft of creation, which was made by some great artist, who is now getting ready to tear it apart.

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 galaxy of a novel: explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It is a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and a shape-shifting epic. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.

© Sheila Heti 2022 (P) Penguin Audio 2022

Critic reviews

An impressive spectrum of meaning and feeling, both abstract and tangible... This one-of-a-kind novel... feels nothing less than vital. (Anthony Cummins)

Pure Colour is the apocalypse written as trance, a sleepwalker's song about the end of all things... There is also Heti's lovely prose to enjoy, her beautifully sustained tone, the way she is, as a writer, earnest, funny and sweet... Pure Colour is an original, a book that says something new for our difficult times. (Anne Enright)

Exemplifies both originality and sharpness... the kind of book that you start reading again as soon as you finish it, to see how on earth the author pulled it off... Descriptions of grief that are so surprising and true they made me gasp. (Hadley Freeman)

Pure Colour is not just a novel, it's a creation myth, a fairy tale, a story about making art and living on this planet. A story about death and the irresistible inner stirrings that bring us back to life. Beautiful and impossible to put down. Sheila Heti is a genius. (Avni Doshi)

Wonderfully entertaining... a treat to read. Expect to take in the work of a true wordsmith. (Kiran Meeda)

What makes Heti's novels so compelling is... the questions her characters need answering at moments of flux in their lives... [Pure Colour] left me full of admiration and wonder. (Johanna Thomas-Corr)

An explicitly mystical book... So new...This book, so full of argument, feels weightless. (Parul Sehgal)

Just like that, there's magic. Like Iris Murdoch's novels, Heti's are philosophically intense, although Heti's work is pared down where Murdoch's was Rabelaisian. Heti owns a sharp axe. In Pure Colour the wood chips that fall are as interesting as the sculpture that gets made. (Dwight Garner)

Buoyed by a dazzling assortment of questions, curiosities and wild propositions that betray the author's agile and untamed mind...[Pure Colour] brings into view a certain organic and ecstatic wholeness: bright splashes of feeling and folly, of grief and loss...[it] defies classification. (Alexandra Kleeman)

Heti excels at small moments, delicately revealed.