Heartbreaking, exciting, profound - a short epic that reimagines what the novel can do

After God created the heavens and the earth, he stood back to contemplate creation, like a painter standing back from the canvas. This is the moment we are living in - the moment of God standing back.

In this first draft of existence, 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.

This is a book about the shape of a life, from beginning to end. It’s about art, critics, and ageing. It’s about the surrounding world - sky, trees, lakes, stars - and ‘the world beyond this world’, which can be glimpsed in rare moments when something shattering occurs.

Pure Colour is a galaxy of a novel- explosive, celestially bright, huge, and streaked with beauty. It’s a contemporary bible, an atlas of feeling, and its shape-shifting, mystical form allows us to take in the whole world in one glance. Sheila Heti is a philosopher of modern experience, and she has reimagined what a book can hold.