Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart: A Novel

By Alice Walker

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple, Possessing the Secret of Joy, and The Temple of My Familiar now gives us a beautiful new novel that is at once a deeply moving personal story and a powerful spiritual journey.

In Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart, Alice Walker has created a work that ranks among her finest achievements: the story of a woman’s spiritual adventure that becomes a passage through time, a quest for self, and a collision with love.

Kate has always been a wanderer. A well-published author, married many times, she has lived a life rich with explorations of the natural world and the human soul. Now, at fifty-seven, she leaves her lover, Yolo, to embark on a new excursion, one that begins on the Colorado River, proceeds through the past, and flows, inexorably, into the future. As Yolo begins his own parallel voyage, Kate encounters celibates and lovers, shamans and snakes, memories of family disaster and marital discord, and emerges at a place where nothing remains but love.

Told with the accessible style and deep feeling that are its author’s hallmarks, Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart is Alice Walker’s most surprising achievement.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
• Release date: Apr 20, 2004
• ISBN: 9781588363961

Alice Walker

Alice Walker is an internationally celebrated writer, poet, and activist whose books include seven novels, four collections of short stories, five children’s books, and several volumes of essays and poetry. She has received the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction and the National Book Award, and has been honored with the O. Henry Award, the Lillian Smith Award, and the Mahmoud Darwish Literary Prize for Fiction. She was inducted into the California Hall of Fame and received the Lennon Ono Peace Award. Her work has been published in forty languages worldwide.

Reviews for Now Is the Time to Open Your Heart

[tanyaferrell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really loved listening to this. It's about a lot of things, but what I took from it was how great it is to be black, bisexual, and free. On freedom, this most importantly deals with how hard it is to be free and how being free may not best serve you in the moment. Kate and Yolo are both considering giving up certain things like love, companionship, possessions, drugs, foods, and ego. In the story, these things are related to the general concept of bondage, things that keep you from being completely free. Kate and Yolo work on figuring out what they'll let go of and what they'll keep and how to deepen and cherish, make special, the things they're in bondage to.In format, this book reminded me a lot of Between the Bridge and the River by Craig Ferguson, in that it's a spiritual / psychological journey that feels a little time & place jumpy and has little wisdoms sprinkled throughout. The writing style and subject also kind of reminded me of Kazuo Ishiguro's A Pale View of Hills, in that the writing is very clear and crisp and bare, extremely well-edited, and the protagonist in both is an older woman contemplating her past and her options, someone willing to blow up their current existence to find happiness. Very good stuff. This is definitely my jam when it comes to literary fiction.

[aleahmarie_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Kate, a woman reaching mid-life, shrugs off all that she is in order to discover who she might be. Her journey takes her down the mighty Colorado River and through the jungles of the Amazon, but her true journey is within. Alice Walker chronicles Kate's odyssey with a literary rhythm that enchants.

[juliette07_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

On the surface this novel tells the story of Kate. She recognises she needs to retreat away from life and at the same time her lover Yolo goes off on holiday to revisit Hawaii. Incidentally, Yolo discovers more than he expected from a sun and sand holiday. Kate also dreams a lot and is conscious of her ageing body. However this novel is also about Alice, Alice Walker the grand daughter who has never known her grandmother. Alice suspects that her grandmother, whose life was cut short when she was murdered, given a longer life would have become the psychic explorer which in fact is exactly what Kate becomes. Along the way Kate traverses the Colorado River and then the Amazon, meets a shaman and generally learns more about ‘herself’ in the company of a group of women and men who are similarly searching. Under the watchful eyes of the shaman Kate, along with her fellow travellers imbibe the mysterious botanical mixtures that release the person within and illuminate the more incomprehensible aspects of the person and their life thus far.I am of the view that this book more so than many others, will speak to you and be rated according to where you, the reader find yourself on life’s journey and the extent to which the deeper more spiritual aspects, connections and cultural thinking resonate with your own progress along that path. Just as I am - here and now, that resonance with my own journey along with the beautiful and reflective writing merits the four star accolade.

[whitewavedarling · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I liked this more than much of Walker's work, and the story was engaging. It isn't necessarily something will stick with me long term, or something I'll go back to, but it is what it is. The writing is strong, and she's kept it short so that it doesn't get so repetitive in theme or subject as some of her books do. If you want a sweet story to fall into for a few days, that won't take much effort, I'd recommend it.

[paisley1974 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book was exactly what I needed to read.