The Heat of the Sun
A Novel
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4.3 • 8 Ratings
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An exuberant debut that sweeps across the twentieth century—beginning where one world-famous love story left off to introduce us to another
With Sophie Tucker belting from his hand-crank phonograph and a circle of boarding-school admirers laughing uproariously around him, Ben "Trouble" Pinkerton first appears to us through the amazed eyes of his Blaze Academy schoolmate, the crippled orphan Woodley Sharpless. Soon Woodley finds his life inextricably linked with this strange boy's. The son of Lieutenant Benjamin Pinkerton and the geisha Madame Butterfly, Trouble is raised in the United States by Pinkerton (now a Democrat senator) and his American wife, Kate. From early in life, Trouble finds himself at the center of some of the biggest events of the century—and though over time Woodley's and Trouble's paths diverge, their lives collide again to dramatic effect.
From Greenwich Village in the Roaring Twenties, to WPA labor during the Great Depression; from secret work at Los Alamos, New Mexico, to a revelation on a Nagasaki hillside by the sea—Woodley observes firsthand the highs and lows of the twentieth century and witnesses, too, the extraordinary destiny of the Pinkerton family.
David Rain's The Heat of the Sun is a high-wire act of sustained invention—as playful as it is ambitious, as moving as it is theatrical, and as historically resonant as it is evocative of the powerful bonds of friendship and of love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Spanning most of the 20th century, Australian author Rain continues the story begun in Madame Butterfly in his ambitious debut. U.S. naval officer Pinkerton becomes a powerful 20th-century political figure through his marriage to Kate, scion of an influential family who raises as her own her husband's illegitimate son, Ben, known as "Trouble." Telling his story and theirs is crippled orphan Woodley Sharpless, whose father was the American consul in the original opera. Woodley and Trouble meet at boarding school and their curious friendship survives decades and distances, Trouble's melodramatic struggles for identity, and his parents' fight for power and influence. Woodley's difficulties in determining his place in the world are less dramatic. Yet the budding poet moves through glittering circles courtesy of his aunt, a "real-life Auntie Mame," travels to Japan before WWII, and, thanks to the Pinkertons, finds himself witness to the Manhattan Project. These characters and a sense of tragedy evoke American authors Fitzgerald and Styron, yet Rain's outsider worldview enriches rather than dulls the narrative, particularly in sequences set in Pacific Rim Asia and others involving the Bomb. The author masterfully weaves Madame Butterfly through the 20th century, assuring that the connections never read as coincidences or plot devices.
