The Heat of the Day

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 *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 *A tensely charged story of betrayal * Independent *Marvellously witty, poetic and socially perceptive novels… she is bang on form with The Heat of the Day * Independent *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 *A haunting novel of bad faith and betrayal * Guardian *Brilliant descriptions of London during the Blitz * Spectator *[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 urgentDense as a poem with symbol and suggestion… The work of a writer [of] rich and winning gifts * Time *Imagine a Graham Greene thriller projected through the sensibility of Virginia Woolf * Atlantic Monthly *

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and land-owner. She travelled a great deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen’s Court, the family house in County Cork which she inherited. Her first book, a collection of shorts stories, Encounters, was published in 1923. The Hotel (1926) was her first novel. She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

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