Books for Hot Weather

The Love of Singular Men begins with a weather report: “The temperature of this novel is always over 31°C.

This is such a beautiful, powerful novel about the burning joys of first love, and the overwhelming grief that lasts a lifetime. Camilo, embittered by age and frustrated by his limited freedom, is reflecting on his childhood in 1970s Rio de Janeiro, an intense and passionate time in which he both discovered and tragically lost his first love. During the languid days of a hot summer in the suburbs of Rio, Camilo’s father brings a boy to live with them. In the midst of the family’s dysfunction and the threats on the streets beyond the garden wall, Camilo and Cosme build a pure and passionate bond, but it is soon brought to a cruel and brutal end. The novel thrums with the heat and the vibrancy and violence of 1970s Rio, and the possibility of revenge hovers hauntingly over the narrative.

Heringer’s voice is assertive and delightfully unique, he switches form and style playfully, and I love his wry humour. The social observations are particularly entertaining, as are his rich depictions of his school class-mate character types which ‘serve as a mould for every human being on the planet.’ It’s a novel rich in the joy and pain of first experiences, and the message that love is fleeting becomes doubly poignant in the knowledge that Heringer passed away just before his 30th birthday.

Elsa Anderson, an international concert pianist and former child prodigy, has frozen part way through a prestigious recital. We meet her in the aftermath of this, and as she travels around various sweltering European cities processing the effects of her failure, she stumbles again and again across an elusive and strangely familiar woman. This novel, like Levy’s other fiction titles, has a beautifully dreamlike tone, and an irresistible eeriness. Deborah Levy is able to capture an atmosphere like no-one else, whilst also portraying fully rounded characters that live and breathe off the page; we don’t know how she does it, but she is a complete master of her art. 

If you’ve read any of Moshfegh’s previous novels, then you may already know that she’s not an author to shy away from a challenge. She’s also possessive of a totally singular authorial voice, and an equally singular dedication to the grotesque. This tale of the inhabitants of the titular (and fictional) mediaeval town over the course of the year – and a particularly gruelling warm season – is unsparing in its depiction of the horrid conditions therein. Famine, disease, drought, feudal lords and their cruel exertions all come into play, as well as an absolutely unbearable summer heatwave, and that’s before you even consider the malevolent and frequently stomach-turning actions of the characters themselves. Our ‘hero’, if you can call him that, is Marek, son of a Lapvonian sheepherder whose desperation to please God takes him into some truly unsettling places. It’s divided reviewers, to put it mildly, but we are firmly on board.

The Perfect Golden Circle follows two rural outcasts, Redbone and Calvert, as they form crop circles in extravagant and mysterious patterns. Set during a scorched British summer, in golden fields of ripe wheat, Redbone and Calvart drink ginger beer and cider as they watch the effects of their artistry unfold. But, amid the clamour of UFO hunters, Celtic mythologists, and exorcists, all drawn to the allure of the crop circles, Myer’s tells a simple story of a male friendship and connection. Drawn together by their shared affinity to the land and desire to create, Redbone and Calvert end up evidencing the power of art and imagination, both in fostering a relationship to each other, and with the natural world itself. 

Set on the Paraná River in Argentina, Not a River follows the fishing trip of Enero, El Negro, and Tilo. After catching and killing a giant ray, they seem to have disturbed something, intruding upon a wider, delicate ecology of which they’re not part. The choric quality of the narration interweaves the intruder’s voices with those of the local inhabitants; in fact, Almada’s prose skillfully interweaves the past with the present, the living with the dead, the human with the animal. Annie McDermott’s translation adds to this poetic quality, creating a soundscape of half-rhymes and echoic murmurs. It’s a novel that seems to ripple, like the river that runs through it, with many undercurrents and tributaries, seamlessly connecting past and present, surface and depths.

Pleasure Beach is the love story of Rachel and Olga, and a third interlocutor, Treesa; their interconnecting accounts, minds, and voices create a swirling prose style that incorporates 90s music references, literary allusions, etymological wordplay and a playful wit. Loosely inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses and the Homeric epic The Odyssey, Pleasure Beach is set over 1 summer day in Blackpool in 1999. Adding to the chorus-like hum of the text,  the prose itself is rich with sensory imagery, chip grease, sea air, and a mesmerising musical soundscape. It’s a truly delightful and whirlwind read that entwines the magical and mundane, the plights of teen love with the delights of a 99 flake. 

You’ll know the premise from plenty of other post-apocalyptic novels from across the 20th Century – an unnamed disaster of some kind, much radiation (hence the heat!), catastrophes unceasing etc – but few authors have tackled the formula with such grace, darkness and intrigue. Termush is the name of an imaginatively luxe hotel complex for which only the very wealthy have been able to make reservations, specifically to outlast the fallout of the aforementioned unnamed disaster. Inevitably outside forces seek to penetrate the inhabitants’ paid-for safety and, of course, bad stuff ensues, but Holm’s blunt, almost sterile prose drapes the perfect veil over the unfolding terror. If you liked Kay Dick’s They, or Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From, you’ll want to make a reservation. 

In 1980s San Francisco, the relationship of two young best friends is put to the test after a single pivotal event as they walk to their exclusive all-girls school. This gloriously nostalgic coming-of-age novel taps into some truly delicious tensions: small-town gossip, the bond of friendship when the world around you is irretrievably changing and, at the heart of it, the idiosyncratic paranoia of being a teenager. Vibrating with the Californian heat, we found this rocket of a novel impossible to resist.

The setting of The Story of a Goat is not so much hot as it is simply arid. We’ve never read a story from the perspective of a goat before. But we found this fable, translated from the original Tamil, honest and quietly powerful. Relying on traditional storytelling and an almost folkloric sense of narrative, this is the story of Poonachi, a goat kid so tiny and frail it seems to be a miracle that she has survived. When she is given to an old village farmer and his wife, they assume that she will be a burden, but keeping her alive and safe becomes a preoccupation for the couple, giving them a much-needed new sense of purpose.

It’s impossible to ignore the sadness and suffering in Poonachi’s story; but through her afflictions, Murugan subtly weaves a pointed criticism of authoritarian power.

A summer work-away at an eco-farm in the French Pyrenees sounds pretty idyllic, especially if, like our narrator Frances, you’re trying to lay low in the aftermath of a murkily-defined affair with your university supervisor. But like most hot weather novels, delightfully warm becomes suffocatingly hot – slowly, like the proverbial frog in a pan of boiling water. Is Frances the frog? And her host, the weirdly magnetic Paul, the pan on heat? And the water… the light-footed prose which ramps up and up in intensity as the novel goes on?

This modernist masterpiece is perfect read for the summer. Set between New Orleans and the Gulf Coast of Louisiana, the novel centres on Edna Pontellier and her increasing dissaffection with the expectations and weights of feminity, marriage and motherhood, largely catalysed by her affair with the young Robert Lebrun which ends with the summer. For fans of Katherine Mansfield and Virginia Woolf, as well as more contemporary feminist writers like Elena Ferrante, Rachel Cusk and Deborah Levy.

Official decree: Deborah Levy is the greatest living author at making heat jump off the page. Is Hot Milk itself like a summer’s day? Take Levy’s calm, economical prose. Blissful to read, although maybe not as blissful as it seems. And Sofia and her mother, Rose — in the south of Spain visiting a mysterious clinic — a relationship always just on the verge of something like a thunderstorm. Deborah Levy is a brilliant writer of both novels and memoir and this is a great place to start. “

To us Bonjour Tristesse is a perfect summer novel. Truly atmospheric, it conjures the shimmering heat and glamour of the Côte d’Azur in the height of summer. Seventeen year old Cécile and her widowed father rent a holiday home with his latest young and beautiful girlfriend to enjoy a summer of bathing, tanning and carefree langour. A masterful study of manipulation, power-plays and guilt, it’s a novel that you can devour in one sun-soaked sitting, but it will stay with you long after you’ve finished reading.

An agonisingly good novella set over the course of a single day. After Rita is found hanged in the local church, Elena refuses to believe her daughter died of suicide. Hampered by the ebbs and flows of her Parkinson’s disease, Elena embarks on a torturous journey to the other side of Buenos Aires looking for answers. For fans of Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead and Death in Her Hands.

A wild folktale about a disenchanted librarian, a remote summer escape, and, yes, a bear. Described – brilliantly – by Margaret Atwood as being as ‘plausible as kitchens’, Bear takes the heat of that summer jaunt and uses it to enliven the librarian’s Lou’s innermost desires in the most unexpected (yet strangely inevitable) ways. Escapist, intellectual, sexy, and with just the right amount of archiving content.

Absolutely not for the faint of heart, Paradais takes place under the blistering glare of the Mexican sun, an intoxicating insight into the mindset of two teenagers with nowhere to direct their anger. Both of them are tied to the leafy and wealthy estate of Paradais, but are tired and incensed by the injustices it higlights. Far from being righteous young idealists, the pair concoct a shocking plan of action to take revenge, detailed in Melchor’s astonishing, tumbling sentences.