With an average high temperature hovering near 90 degrees in Douglas County, August is perennially hot.

This month’s book recommendations are all about the heat. Used as a literary device, oppressive summer heat plays a role in all the stories listed below. So, find some air conditioning and pick up a book that swelters.

Heat Wave by Penelope Lively “is a moving portrayal of a fragile family damaged and defined by adultery, and the lengths to which a mother will go to protect the ones she loves,” states the author’s blurb. Heat and tension build all summer as Pauline suspects her son-in-law’s dalliance with his co-worker.

A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr follows Great War veteran Tom Birkin to a remote village in Yorkshire for the summer. He battles the heat, living in the bell tower, while restoring a medieval mural in the local country church. Tom faces his personal demons while discovering the power of ancient art on the church walls.

Instructions for a Heatwave by Maggie O’Farrell is historical fiction set in the height of the 1976 British heatwave. When Gretta’s husband of 40 years goes out to get the paper and never returns, she calls her three grown kids home.

The Seven Sisters by Alex Wheatle is a young adult novel inspired by the author’s personal experiences growing up in Shirley Oaks Children’s Home in south London. Partly driven by the immense heat, four boys escape from the children’s home that is not much of a home and discover the forest isn’t what they expected.

The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald is a classic Jazz Age American tragedy. A story of excess and unrequited love, Jay Gatsby embodies the American dream to win back the woman he once loved, the married Daisy Buchanan. Much of the book takes place in the sweltering summer heat in New York, and Fitzgerald uses it to escalate tension throughout the story.

A Fatal Inversion by Ruth Rendell, written under the pen name Barbara Vine, is a crime mystery novel about the discovery of two skeletons, a woman and baby, found buried in the pet cemetery of an English country home. Ten years earlier, during the unbearable heat of 1976, a small group of young adults lived riotously on the estate.

Outline by Rachel Cusk is written in 10 conversations. The novel is book one of the Outline trilogy. A British woman moves to Greece for a summer to teach writing classes. She faces the cruel Athenian heat and becomes an audience of one as the people she meets tell her their stories.

A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. Set on a large Iowa farm, the Cook family faces oppressive summer heat and a host of domestic and professional issues as patriarch Larry decides to retire and split the farm amongst his daughters. Both the book (and movie) are modernized retellings of Shakespeare’s King Lear.

Swamplandia! by Karen Russell is set in the Florida Everglades at a gator-wrestling theme park. When the park headliner and mother of the family dies, 12-year-old Ava realizes she is most able to keep the family from falling apart and the struggling theme park afloat.

Holes by Louis Sachar is the first book of a middle grade classic children’s series. Teenager Stanley Yelnats is wrongly convicted of stealing a pair of shoes and sent to Camp Green Lake. But the namesake lake is long dry. The boys in the desert detention center are ordered to dig holes five feet wide and five feet deep. But “character building” hole digging is a ruse to cover the Warden’s true plans.

Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens is set in the heat of North Carolina marshes and swamps. The coming-of-age murder mystery is one of the bestselling books of all time. Kya grows up mostly alone in a shack on the marsh, half feral. Years later, the town’s golden boy turns up dead in the swamp and there is a connection to Kya.

 

By Celeste McNeil; courtesy photos