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The Heat of the Day
- Author
- Elizabeth Bowen
- Narrator
- Nadia Albina
- Publisher
- Random House
- Publish Date
- 10 June 2021
- Run Time
- 11 hours 34 minutes
- Format
- Audiobook
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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
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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
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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
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A tensely charged story of betrayal
Independent
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Marvellously witty, poetic and socially perceptive novels... she is bang on form with The Heat of the Day
Independent
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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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A haunting novel of bad faith and betrayal
Guardian
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Brilliant descriptions of London during the Blitz
Spectator
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[Bowen] startles us by sheer originality of mind and boldness of sensibility into seeking our world afresh. . . . Out of the plainest things--the drawing of a curtain--she can make something electric and urgent
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Dense as a poem with symbol and suggestion. . . The work of a writer [of] rich and winning gifts
Time
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Imagine a Graham Greene thriller projected through the sensibility of Virginia Woolf
Atlantic Monthly
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Details
- Author
- Elizabeth Bowen
- Narrator
- Nadia Albina
- Duration
- 11 hours 34 minutes
- Release Date
- 10 June 2021
- ISBN
- 9781473596047
- Format
- Audiobook
- Publisher
- Random House
- Genre
- Modern and contemporary fiction: general and literary, Second World War fiction, Espionage and spy thriller
Synopsis
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
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