Heat Wave by Penelope Fitzgerald

Heat Wave by Penelope Lively
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

What pleasure it is to be in the hands of a virtuoso writer. The pacing, sentences, descriptions, vocabulary, contribute to a thoughtful story of legitimate characters with a surprising ending. Pauline, a book editor, is spending the long, hot summer editing a novel while her daughter and grandson live next door. She says to her two-year-old grandson: "Oh, books, books...Terrible things, books. Cause nothing but trouble. You keep out of the book business, my lad. Commodity dealing for you. Or heart surgery. Or the construction of oil rigs." Occasionally, they are joined by her writer son-in-law whose philandering reminds Pauline of her own ex-husband. As the book jacket reveals of the ending, "a stunning and unexpected development changes the order of things irrevocably for this family."

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