The narrator and protagonist of Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s most recent novel, Pure Colour, is Mira, a girl wandering through life after the death of her beloved father. She also loves her friend Annie, an impossibly cool orphan kid she met during college who was then training to be an art critic. The book starts from the vantage point of Mira situated in what she understands to be God’s first draft of creation, which will soon be scrapped for the next, and vastly improved, version. As Heti’s books go, this too is a wild lounging in the forests of philosophy, ways of being and theology, foregrounded by Mira’s thoughts, ruminations, and insecurities. Through her words, we understand how escapable Annie’s feelings are for Mira, the ephemerality of life beyond death, the corporeal limitations to which we humans unnecessarily subject ourselves to and how easy it is to transcend beyond the set human and other boundaries.

In a time of extreme climate change, post-apocalypse becoming the everyday and the world living through the second year of an endemic, Heti’s novel comes as a breather. She makes us believe, even if only for a few hours, that if our current life is shabby, dog-eared and imperfect, then there lies a second one, not too far into the future. It’s even fitting that Heti —the most memorable chronicler of artistic anxiety in the aughts — has turned her attention in 2022 to a young person’s end of the world anxieties.