Pure Colour

Sheila Heti’s Pure Colour is one of her stranger books, even by her standards. The premise is that humanity is in the second draft of God’s creation, and the protagonist Mira spends much of the novel processing grief over her father’s death by inhabiting, briefly, a leaf.

It sounds like a joke. Heti plays it straight.

The book is divided into sections that read more like meditations than chapters. There’s a love story with a woman named Annie. There’s a long stretch of grief. There’s a recurring framework about three kinds of people, classified as birds, fish, or bears, that Heti uses to think about how different people grieve and love differently.

Fans of Motherhood and How Should a Person Be will recognize the voice. Readers new to her may find this the most demanding entry point. The reward, for the right reader, is the kind of book you keep thinking about for months.