The Heat of the Day

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What to expect

Brought to you by Penguin.

It is wartime London, and the carelessness of people with no future flows through the evening air.

Stella discovers that her lover Robert is suspected of selling information to the enemy. Harrison, the British intelligence agent on his trail, wants to bargain, the price for his silence being Stella herself.

Caught between two men and unsure who she can trust, the flimsy structures of Stella's life begin to crumble.

© Elizabeth Bowen 1948 (P) Penguin Audio 2021

Critics Review

  • Probably the most intelligent noir ever written…The situation is surreal, the psychologizing profound, and the eerie inwardness trapped in Bowen’s distinctive prose resonates inside a peculiar silence that fills the reader’s heart with dread

    Los Angeles Times

  • One of three quintessential London ‘war’ novels, the others being Patrick Hamilton’s Hangover Square and Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair. No other novel conjures the spooky solemnity of the Blitz so adroitly

    Time Out

  • A tensely charged story of betrayal

    Independent

  • Marvellously witty, poetic and socially perceptive novels… she is bang on form with The Heat of the Day

    Independent

  • This world reminds you of both Henry James and Graham Greene…a world both placid and violently fractured…Bowen’s prose is crisp and precise, but also suggestive and haunting…She combines moral refinement and pitiless but compasionate understanding

    Sunday Times

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