Book description
When recently orphaned Woodley Sharpless encounters Ben Pinkerton
-- known to all as 'Trouble' -- for the first time at the exclusive
Blaze Academy, he is instantly enraptured. They are polar opposites;
Ben is exotic and daring; Woodley is bookish and frail, yet their
lives quickly become inextricable intertwined. First at school, then
in the staccato days of twenties 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. As the curtain falls on
the frivolity of the twenties and rises to reveal the cruelty of a new
decade, Woodley and Ben's friendship begins to fragment. Over the
coming years the two men meet intermittently; in Japan before the
outbreak of the Second World War and then in the midst of the
Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Change in both their lives, their
relationship and their suffering, stand for a generation; one
dispersed by depression and upheaval, brutality and confusion. David
Rain's novel, The Heat of the Sun, is an ambitious and assured debut
that captures perfectly two friends, two loves: two lives.
David Rain is an Australian writer who lives in London. He has
taught literature and writing at Queen's University of Belfast,
University of Brighton, and Middlesex University, London.
