Heat Wave - by Penelope Lively (Paperback)

About the Book

A two-dwelling greystone cottage outside of London, World's End is home to Pauline, 1 55-year-old widow, her daughter Teresa, her son-in-law Maurice, and her grandson Luke. Pauline fears for her daughter, for she senses that Maurice is infatuated with another woman. As the summer draws on and the temperatures reach record levels, she finds herself forced to confront the lingering, simmering anger she still feels over the infidelity of her own late husband while watching her daughter's marriage come to an end.

Book Synopsis

It is a long, hot summer at World's End, a two-family grey stone cottage in the English countryside. Pauline is editing a romance novel in the smaller dwelling, and the larger part is occupied by her daughter, Teresa; Teresa's baby; and her husband, Maurice, a writer, whose infatuation with his editor's girlfriend is growing.

Pauline fears for Teresa, who is passionately in love with her husband, for she senses Maurice's imminent betrayal. She remembers a time when her possessive passion for Teresa's father eroded her own youth. A stunning and unexpected denouncement irrevocably changes the order of things for this family, whose intimacy the reader abandons reluctantly at novel's end.

Review Quotes

"You don't want to part company with these characters, who, time and again, elicit a sensation of intense familiarity." -- "The New Yorker""The work is Jamesian...in its complexities and its carefulness....A lovely, lovely novel." -- Fay Weldon, "Los Angeles Times""Lively knows well the topography of the human heart." -- "People""Absorbingly readable....Ms. Lively evokes the atmosphere of anxiety, suspicion, and frustration with great finesse." -- "Wall Street Journal""Witty, intelligent, and understated...Its conclusion...adds a dash of the unexpected and the delicious to what is otherwise a quiet story, such as most of us live to tell."-- Jonathan Yardley, "Washington Post""A satisfying novel...[Lively] creates a convincing picture of obsessive sexual love tainted by jealousy and misery."-- "Publishers Weekly" (starred review)