Heatwave
An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Oscar is dead because I watched him die and did nothing.
An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021
‘A short, sharp, shock of a novel… beautifully done’ Daily Mail
'The modern day successor to Francoise Sagan' Evening Standard
‘Jestin evokes adolescent turmoil with great delicacy and poignancy’ Times Literary Supplement
''The Summer Page-Turner You Have To Read' Waterstones
Winner of the Prix de la vocation 2019
Winner of the Prix Femina de lycéens 2019
Translated by Sam Taylor, translator of Lullaby by Leila Slimani, The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker and HHhH by Laurent Binet
Leonard is an outsider, a seventeen-year-old uncomfortable in his own skin who is forced to endure a family camping holiday in the South of France. 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. However, when he cannot sleep due to the sound of wild carousing outside his tent, he gets up and goes for a walk.
As he wanders among the dunes, he sees Oscar, one of the cooler kids, drunk in a playground, hanging by his neck from the ropes of a swing. Frozen into inaction, he watches Oscar struggle to breathe until finally his body comes loose and falls lifeless to the ground. Unable to think straight, he buries Oscar in the sand and returns to the campsite where, oppressed by the ferocious heat and the weight of what he did and did not do, he will try to spend the remaining hours of the holiday as if nothing had happened.
Told over the space of a long weekend, this intense and brilliant novel is the story of an adolescent struggling to fit in. Heatwave is a gripping psychological thriller that poses the existential question:
Is doing nothing sometimes the very worst thing you can do?
PRAISE FOR HEATWAVE:
"This is a searingly vivid novel that depicts the torments of adolescence in a sensual, carnal way. But it is also a profound meditation on the mystery of evil, our deadly urges, and the savagery that lies deep within each of us. I loved the writing, which is spare but highly evocative, and I admired the way that the author used the enclosed world of the campsite to fuel the claustrophobic tension that mounts throughout." Leila Slimani, author of Lullaby
‘With a searing voice, Victor Jestin captures the stale air of tents, the cheap music, the guys disguised in pink bunny suits who force you to have fun, teenagers as poignant as they are idiotic, rage, desire, absurdity. In effect, scorching’ Grazia
‘A fiery page-turner’ Entertainment Weekly
‘Jestin’s charged and chilling debut turns on a stifling vacation that descends from purgatory into a nightmarish inferno’ Publishers Weekly
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‘With a searing voice, Victor Jestin captures the stale air of tents, the cheap music, the guys disguised in pink bunny suits who force you to have fun, teenagers as poignant as they are idiotic, rage, desire, absurdity. In effect, scorching’ Grazia
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Jestin's charged and chilling debut turns on a stifling vacation that descends from purgatory into a nightmarish inferno. Near the end of 17-year-old narrator Leonard's stay with his family at a beachside resort in southwest France, Leonard sees another boy, Oscar, attempting to strangle himself on a swing set. Rather than help, Leonard watches him die, then, in a panic, buries the body in the dunes. ("I hadn't made many stupid mistakes in my 17 years of life," Leonard reflects in a typical understatement.) There are hints of Leonard's jealousy over a girl, Luce, whom he'd recently seen kissing Oscar, but Leonard's callousness is best understood as existential angst: "I had accumulated my hate and anger slowly, patiently." Leonard then listens to a friend's libidinous monologues; embarks on a romance with Luce, who is inexplicably drawn to Leonard's sullen reticence; and rails against the oppressive atmosphere of enforced fun. As Leonard wrestles over whether to come clean, Jestin nicely juxtaposes the eerie fact of the buried body against the round-the-clock party atmosphere at the resort: "It was all too bright, too cheerful, for someone to be dead." Though not the subtlest portrait of adolescence, Leonard's curt voice is distinctly effective. Jestin's memorable vision of a crushing landscape will linger with the reader.