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

Product Information

If you do nothing to prevent someone from dying does that make you a murderer or merely an unfortunate bystander?

Heatwave by Victor Jestin | Waterstones

Meanwhile, the teenage summer rituals continue all around him—the fighting and flirting, the smell of salt and sunscreen, the tinny announcements from the loudspeaker, and above all, the crushing, relentless heat. Instead of coming to Oscar’s aid, Leonard remains frozen, watching him struggle for air and eventually die. This was marketed as an 'exploration into people's darkest impulses' or whatever, which naturally intrigued me, but this was just not. A vivid, mesmerizing novel about a teenage boy on vacation who makes an irrevocable mistake and becomes trapped in a spiral of guilt and desire—in the tradition of Alice McDermott’ s That Night and E.

Eerie, propulsive, sexy, and unsettling, Victor Jestin’s Heatwave carries the coming-of-age novel into darkly surprising new territory. On the final Friday of the trip, unable to sleep, Leonard goes for a walk and sees one of the boys from the campsite, Oscar, hanging from the rope of a playground swing.

Heatwave | Victor Jestin | 9781471199776 | NetGalley Heatwave | Victor Jestin | 9781471199776 | NetGalley

Er ist extrem auf der Suche nach sich selbst, löst sich von seiner Familie und fühlt sich mit sich sehr allein. This guy has a lot of guts to go see the dead guy’s girlfriend; I would’ve been an absolutely nervous wreck if I had done that immediately after failing to inform people you found the dude’s body.My library never used to have what was hip and in, but now they’re getting a lot of new books translated, which gives me quite a bit of joy. Sometimes the writing and story work, young boys and girls exploring their sexuality, and sometimes not at all. The blurb immediately gave me goosebumps, a seventeen-year-old who finds another boy killing himself, and decides in a split second, to bury the boy.

Heatwave | Book by Victor Jestin | Official Publisher Page

The Short Story Dagger gives a nod to bestselling Norwegian juggernaut Jo Nesbo with his story “London" from his first book of short stories, The Jealousy Man (Harvill Secker). Der Autor hat wohl diese Jahre selbst noch sehr gut im Gedächtnis, da es ihm wirklich gut gelungen ist, diesen Charakter zu zeichnen. Like when you loath another person and have that horrible fleeting thought, “Oh why don’t they just die and leave me alone then my life would be so much easier,” but in this instance he gets exactly what he wants and is filled with a general malaise.And then I had a very clear memory of a large hole that some children had dug in the dune that afternoon. Kid buries the body, spends an entire day being maudlin (and that’s the most apt word for him) and being creepy with the local girls. It's small and French and the main character is indifferent and angsty and also someone dies violently. 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).