Heatwave: An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021

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Poi fa qualcosa di altrettanto irrimediabile, ma anche più assurdo: sotterra in spiaggia il corpo di Oscar sotto la sabbia di una duna. Tired of awkwardly creeping out of beach parties after only a couple of beers, he chooses to spend the final Friday night of the trip in bed. This year sees firm favourites from the genre including Mark Billingham, Susan Hill, Lin Anderson and Cath Staincliffe. The headline Gold Dagger, awarded for the crime novel of the year, sees Hawkins nominated for A Slow Fire Burning (Doubleday), alongside Billingham’s Rabbit Hole (Sphere) and Imran Mahmood’s I Know What I Saw (Raven).

Heatwave by Victor Jestin - Audiobook | Scribd Heatwave by Victor Jestin - Audiobook | Scribd

It tells the story of Leonard, an awkward 17 year old boy enduring a family camping holiday in France and struggling to fit in with his peers. Una sorta di sturm und drang declinato secondo la lezione dell’esistenzialismo (celeberrima la conclusione Sartre a L’essere e il nulla: “L’uomo è una passione inutile”), ma inserito nella condizione giovanile contemporanea, dove lo sfasamento tra percezione della realtà e capacità di tradurla in parole sembra caratterizzare la generazione dei millennial asservita ai social. The book opens with Leonard witnessing from afar his friend Oskar commit suicide in the middle of the night after a party.Disoriented by the oppressive heat, and distracted by his desire for a girl named Luce, Leonard spends the ensuing hours trying not to unravel. I had never heard of this young emerging author from France before, so I was shocked to find this in the new section of my library. k.a 'Leo,' mired in some particularly severe adolescent angst during his family's annual summer holiday to a community campground on a beachfront.

Heatwave: The most deliciously dark beach read of the summer

He describes the hottest day the country has known in 17 years and we can feel the sweltering heat, smell the suntan lotion and hear the buzz of people converging at the camp and on the beach. Tense and brief, this text plays with the codes of a first novel to paint a portrait of a sad and aloof teenager. The references to the heat don’t only add to the atmosphere, Jestin also uses it to reference global warming and our ignorance of the climate crisis: “Every year it got hot earlier – this year it had been in February – and we had welcomed it without fear, happy to see the end of winter; we’d sat out on café terraces with no sense of foreboding about what it might mean.Leonard does nothing to stop or help his friend and feels mixed emotions - happiness he's dead, guilt, and that he killed him because of not helping him. But I just had higher expectations, wanting to feel the guilt and the sadness more, wanting to know about Oscar more. I wonder if this novel is intended as a modern retelling of Camus’ The Outsider, because Leonard is certainly that - an awkward loner who doesn’t fit into society or really understand how to or want to fit in - and the story centres around a singular death (there are also more superficial similarities like the beach setting, the length of the novel and both authors’ French nationalities).