David Rain
“A remarkable debut that reinvents, elaborates and extends into the late 20th century the story Puccini made famous in Madam Butterfly… Rain is master of this inventive, operatic and at moments harrowing debut.” Kirkus Reviews
When recently orphaned Woodley Sharpless encounters Ben Pinkerton for the first time at the exclusive Blaze Academy, he is instantly enraptured. They are complete opposites; Ben is exotic and daring; Woodley is bookish and frail, yet their lives quickly become inextricably intertwined. First at school, then in the staccato days of 1920’s New York, Woodley sees flashes of another person in his friend and slowly discovers a side of Ben's nature that belies a dark and hidden history.
Moving between Paris, New York City, Venice, Nagasaki and New Mexico during the final days of the Manhattan Project, this is a story of obsession, guilt and betrayal, in which a rich cast of supporting characters illuminate the central trio of Trouble, Senator Pinkerton and his wife Kate, as the world plunges – with inexorable gravity – towards that eternal moment, one summer's morning, when the atomic cloud blooms above the city where a young man had dallied with a girl known as Butterfly, forty years before.
"David Rain's striking debut novel manages the audacious feat of burying its soul of romantic tragedy inside a story of great theatrical invention and whimsy. The result is wholly original. Read it and the 20th Century may never look the same to you again." John Burnham Schwartz, author of Reservation Road and The Commoner
Like the historical epochs and episodes it weaves into a mesmerizing puzzle, The Heat of the Sun is by turns wildly colorful and strait-laced, witty and rueful, reserved and operatic. David Rain's clever mixture of fact and famous fiction puts a new spin on the ‘butterfly effect.’”
--Andrew Solomon, National Book Award winner and author of New York Times bestseller The Noonday Demon
DAVID RAIN is an Australian writer who lives in London. Formerly a lecturer in English Literature at Queen’s University, Belfast he now runs the MA Creative Writing degree at Middlesex University.
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