If you’re wondering what to read while it’s hot, here’s a round-up of sultry classics that’ll make you sweat.
Of all these, I particularly recommend The Island by Ana María Matute, the lyrical and sometimes feverish story of an adolescent summer. The island of the title is Mallorca during the Spanish Civil War: it becomes both an enchanted paradise and a hellish stew of ancient resentments . . .
Heat Wave by Penelope Lively (1996)
Pauline is spending the summer at World’s End in the English countryside, along with her daughter Teresa, her son-in-law Maurice and her baby grandson. As secrets emerge in the heat, growing tensions lead to a violent climax. Heat Wave is ‘extraordinarily good’, writes Susan Hill, ‘intelligent and perceptive.’
Penguin Modern Classics | 192 pages
Hothouse by Brian Aldiss (1962)
The earth has stopped spinning: the world is now baking hot and dominated by carnivorous tropical vegetation, including enormous, spider-like monsters that spin interplanetary cobwebs. The few remaining humans, on the brink of extinction, shelter in the canopy of a banyan tree.
Penguin Modern Classics | 288 pages | introduced by Neil Gaiman
The Island by Ana María Matute (1959)
In the oppressive stillness of summer, Matia finds herself on the island of Mallorca during the Spanish Civil War, frustrated by her domineering grandmother, fascinated by her mercurial cousin Borja and intrigued by silent Manuel.
Penguin Modern Classics | 192 pages | translated by Laura Lonsdale
The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen (1948)
In London during the Blitz, Stella Rodney develops a late-flowering love affair with Robert Kelway, who may perhaps be a German spy. ‘Probably the most intelligent noir ever written,’ said the Los Angeles Times.
Vintage Classics | 400 pages
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
Nouveau-riche bootlegger Jay Gatsby throws lavish Long Island parties and obsesses about his former lover, the beautiful Daisy Buchanan, who lives across the bay in East Egg. Relationships start to combust as the mercury rises and everyone drinks too many mint juleps.
Oxford World’s Classics | 208 pages | edited by Ruth Prigozy
The Power and the Glory by Graham Greene (1940)
Set in Mexico, The Power and the Glory describes a ‘whisky priest’ in the state of Tabasco, fleeing anti-Catholic purges, and an anonymous, socialist lieutenant committed to hunting him down. It is ‘generally agreed to be Graham Greene’s masterpiece’, says John Updike in his introduction.
Vintage Classics | 220 pages | introduced by John Updike
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949)
After ten years of marriage, an American couple, Kit and Port Moresby, are sexually estranged and travelling through the remote Algerian desert, searching for meaning in the face of a hostile environment and mounting existential panic. Tennessee Williams compared this novel to a summer thunderstorm, ‘pulsing with interior flashes of fire’.
Penguin Modern Classics | 368 pages | introduced by Paul Theroux
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez (1981)
Santiago Nasar is brutally murdered in a small town by two brothers. All the townspeople know it is going to happen, including the victim, but in the relentless heat nobody does anything to prevent the killing. Twenty seven years later, a man comes to town to piece together the contradictory testimonies of the townsfolk.
Penguin Books | 128 pages
Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan (1954)
Sagan wrote Bonjour Tristesse (Hello Sadness) when she was eighteen, after being expelled from two schools and failing her second-year exams at the Sorbonne. It was an immediate succès de scandale: a coming-of-age novel about seventeen-year-old Cécile and the sexual politics of a sultry holiday on the French Riviera with her playboy father and his mistresses. Otto Preminger directed a film adaptation in 1958.
Penguin Modern Classics | 120 of 240 pages | translated by Heather Lloyd | introduced by Rachel Cusk
In the Heat of the Night by John Ball (1965)
On a hot night in South Carolina, a famous conductor is found dead in the middle of the highway with his head caved in. This is a case for Virgil Tibbs, the softly spoken African American homicide detective. In the Heat of the Night was written at the height of the civil rights movement. The 1967 film adaptation, starring Sidney Poitier, won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Penguin Modern Classics | 176 pages
What are your favourite hot classics? Let me know in a comment below!
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Summer - Edith Wharton. - short and strange
Bonjour Tristesse! Still have my 25p Penguin copy. We all started reading her as student nurses in the early 1970s. The books skinny enough to slip behind your apron when night sister came round.
My hot summer read would be The Awakening by Kate Chopin.