Mira, an art criticism student, loves art more than anything else, works part-time in a decorative lamp store, and moves from one damp apartment to another. A sudden encounter with the mysterious, detached Annie and the death of her caring father turn her life upside down, forcing her to see herself, her relationships, and the world around her from a completely new perspective.
In her new novel, Sheila Heti departs from the tools of autofiction and immerses readers in a fictional, almost fairytale-like reality where the abstract and metaphysical exist alongside the tangible and earthly. What if the world is just a rough draft, destined to disappear so that God, having learned from his mistakes, can create a second version—one without flaws—while bird-people, fish-people, and bear-people criticize his work and seek an impossible intimacy with one another? Sheila Heti's poetic and paradoxical novel, 'Pure Color,' reads like a modern parable about love and loss, creation and imperfection, and the difficulty of finding the right distance from those we hold dear.
Sheila Heti is a Canadian writer, author of 'What Should a Person Be?', 'Motherhood,' 'Pure Color,' and others. She was named one of fifteen writers from around the world who are shaping literature in the 21st century by The New York Times. Her books have been translated into twenty-five languages. She lives in Toronto.
