Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

CBC Books | | Posted: December 14, 2021 11:17 PM | Last Updated: November 16, 2022

Governor General's Literary Award for fiction winner

Image | BOOK COVER: Pure Colour by Sheila Heti

(Penguin Random House Canada)

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 for school. 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 the 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. (From Penguin Random House Canada)

Pure Colour won the 2022 Governor General's Literary Award for fiction.

Sheila Heti is a noted Canadian playwright and author of eight books of fiction and nonfiction whose work has been translated in over a dozen languages. Her play All Our Happy Days are Stupid appeared on stages in New York and Toronto and her book How Should a Person Be? was a New York Times Notable Book. Her novel Motherhood was on the shortlist for the 2018 Scotiabank Giller Prize.

Interviews with Sheila Heti

Media Audio | The Sunday Magazine : In Pure Colour, writer Sheila Heti uses humour to tackle the challenges of modern life

Caption: In her new novel Pure Colour, Canadian author Sheila Heti explores the idea that the world is an unfinished work of art, whose creator is getting ready to scrap and start over... because the first draft just didn't cut it. David Common speaks with Heti about the book's themes of grief, climate change and the human condition, along with the personal loss that shaped its narrative.