The Heat of the Day
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  • Published: 7 January 2025
  • ISBN: 9781784879853
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $22.99

The Heat of the Day

Formats & editions
Paperback
7 Jan 2025
Paperback
3 Jul 1998
Audiobook
10 Jun 2021
Paperback
9 Jul 2002
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This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition.

A haunting portrayal of love and betrayal in a London hollowed by war.

It is wartime London, and the carelessness of people with no future flows through the evening air. Stella discovers that her lover Robert is suspected of selling information to the enemy. Harrison, the British intelligence agent on his trail, wants to bargain, the price for his silence being Stella herself. Caught between two men and unsure who she can trust, the flimsy structures of Stella's life begin to crumble.

‘Alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death’ London Review of Books

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY ROY FOSTER

This series of war novels from Vintage Classics presents eight powerful stories about the horror and waste of war - each a passionate plea to prevent its repetition
  • Published: 7 January 2025
  • ISBN: 9781784879853
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 400
  • RRP: $22.99
Categories:

About the author

Elizabeth Bowen

Elizabeth Bowen was born in Dublin in 1899, the only child of an Irish lawyer and landowner. She was educated at Downe House School in Kent. Her book Bowen's Court (1942) is the history of her family and their house in County Cork, and Seven Winters (1943) contains reminiscences of her Dublin childhood. In 1923 she married Alan Cameron, who held an appointment with the BBC and who died in 1952. She travelled a good deal, dividing most of her time between London and Bowen's Court, which she inherited.

Elizabeth Bowen is considered by many to be one of the most distinguished novelists of the twentieth century. Her first book, a collection of short stories, Encounters, appeared in 1923, followed by another, Ann Lee's, in 1926. The Hotel (1927) was her first novel, and was followed by The Last September (1929), Joining Charles (1929), another book of short stories, Friends and Relations (1931), To the North (1932), The Cat Jumps (short stories, 1934), The House in Paris (1935), The Death of the Heart (1938), Look at All Those Roses (short stories, 1941), The Demon Lover (short stories, 1945), The Heat of the Day (1949), Collected Impressions (essays, 1950), The Shelborne (1951), A World of Love (1955), A Time in Rome (1960), Afterthought (essays, 1962), The Little Girls (1964), A Day in the Dark (1965) and her last book Eva Trout (1969).

She was awarded the CBE in 1948, and received honorary degrees from Trinity College, Dublin in 1949, and from Oxford University in 1956. In the same year she was appointed Lacy Martin Donnelly Fellow at Bryn Mawr College in the United States. The Royal Society of Literature made her a Companion of Literature in 1965. Elizabeth Bowen died in 1973.

Also by Elizabeth Bowen

The Selected Stories of Elizabeth Bowen
Elizabeth Bowen
Friends And Relations
The Death Of The Heart
Collected Stories
A Time In Rome
The Hotel
See all

Praise for 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

John Bayley, 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 urgent

V. S. Pritchett

Dense 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

a book of signal wit and beauty that shows many ways of being a woman under intolerable strain... The electrifying ubiquity of danger - the novel is set in London under the Blitz - summons tenderness and the appetite for life. London itself breathes, turns and glows throughout

Candia McWilliam, The Lady

Both of its time and timeless, a spy tale and a haunting love story... She is the supreme mid-century anatomist of the heart, with a unique sensitivity to the lives of ordinary English men and women in extremis

Guardian

Her novels and essays are alive with the erotic tensions of the blackout, the Blitz and the heightened pleasures of sex in the proximity of death. Preternaturally sensitive to colour, light and detail, she caught the nuances of the unnameable new sensations Londoners experienced

London Review of Books

Stylistically intense…[a] richly atmospheric portrait of a city and its residents under constant threat. It has a cast of memorable female characters who outshine the men

Daily Mail
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