Heatwave: An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021

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The CWA Dagger shortlists will be announced on 13th May at CrimeFest . The awards ceremony will be held at the Leonardo City hotel in London on 29th June, coinciding with National Crime Reading Month. The 2022 Diamond Dagger, awarded to an author whose crime-writing career has been marked by sustained excellence, has already been announced as going to C J Sansom. Tense and brief, this text plays with the codes of a first novel to paint a portrait of a sad and aloof teenager’ L’Humanite The Victim’ by Awais Khan in Criminal Pursuits: Crime Through Time edited by Samantha Lee Howe (Telos Publishing) The story opens with him watching a suicide and making the conscious decision to not stop it. The reason being hinted at that this other boy had the attention of the girl he wanted to be with. Like when you loath another person and have that horrible fleeting thought, “Oh why don’t they just die and leave me alone then my life would be so much easier,” but in this instance he gets exactly what he wants and is filled with a general malaise. Ma è una sensazione che dura poche pagine. Non si tratta di quell’apatia esistenziale, di quell’indifferenza nei confronti del vivere.

Heatwave by Victor Jestin | Goodreads

The young author of this first novel keeps all promises, with writing of a rare precision, mature and carnal... Moving and cinematic.”— La Vie It is the end of August and the long summer holidays are drawing to a close. Seventeen-year-old Leonard is on a camping holiday with his family in the South of France. Awkward and ill at ease, he is an outsider who creeps away from parties unnoticed after a couple of drinks.Léonard is 17 en brengt met zijn ouders, jongere broer en zus de laatste vakantiedagen op de camping door. The 2022 Crime Writers’ Association (CWA) Dagger awards longlists have been revealed with Paula Hawkins, Mark Billingham, Janice Hallett and John Banville among the chosen. Heatwave won the Prix de la vocation 2019 and the Prix Femina de Lycéens 2019 and it’s an intense, short, dark, suspenseful thriller set over the course of a weekend. It tells the story of Leonard, an awkward 17 year old boy enduring a family camping holiday in France and struggling to fit in with his peers. This drawn-out wandering of a boy outside the norm has been brought to life by the incredible precision of this young author’s voice’ Prima

Heatwave by Victor Jestin | Waterstones Heatwave by Victor Jestin | Waterstones

With a searing voice, Victor Jestin captures the stale air of tents, the cheap music, the guys disguised in pink bunny suits who force you to have fun, teenagers as poignant as they are idiotic, rage, desire, absurdity. In effect, scorching’ Grazia Ultimately, Heatwave is an intriguing thriller which examines good versus evil and humanity’s underlying barbarism when faced with unfamiliar situations. It also comments on societal pressure to conform and, on the other side of the spectrum, questions the artificial nature of people’s behaviour, their superficiality and their ability to ignore the issues they don’t want to deal with. Jestin’s charged and chilling debut turns on a stifling vacation that descends from purgatory into a nightmarish inferno.”The much-anticipated John Creasey (New Blood) Dagger highlights the best debut novels. Among the rising stars of 2022 is Hallett with her debut The Appeal (Viper Books) which was a Sunday Times Crime Book of the Year. Victor Jestin succeeds in transporting us with almost nothing, this unique style, this voice—one might almost say these whispers.... A tour de force.” —Le Figaro Culture

Heatwave | Book by Victor Jestin | Official Publisher Page

A beautiful narrative that puts into play the kind of guilt that won’t quit a boy who’s alienated from his world and resistant to all its codes.”— Telerama Mooi portret van een adolescent, die het gevoel heeft dat hij niet thuis hoort in de wereld waarin hij zich momenteel bevindt. Een portret dat ook ergens laat begrijpen waarom hij die vreemde beslissingen neemt wanneer hij ziet hoe één van de andere campingjongeren zelfmoord pleegt. If so, could Leo be an unreliable narrator and, like in Camus’ novel, the death that occurs is a murder - did Leo actually murder Oscar, because he was jealous of his being with Luce, the girl he fancies, and Leo distanced himself from the crime like he distances himself from everything else in his life, pretending the swings killed him instead? It would explain the bizarre choice of not alerting anyone to Oscar’s accidental death and implicating himself unnecessarily.

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Barcollando nella vita così lontano dal proprio sé, si aggira nottetempo lungo la spiaggia ed è allora che assiste, apparentemente indifferente, alla morte di un coetaneo. So, this wasn’t a bad book, at all, and I’ll definitely read another book by Victor Jestin. But I just had higher expectations, wanting to feel the guilt and the sadness more, wanting to know about Oscar more. Maybe even about Leo more, not just a snippet (okay, an important one) out of his life.

Heatwave by Victor Jestin | Crime Fiction Lover Heatwave by Victor Jestin | Crime Fiction Lover

I wonder if this novel is intended as a modern retelling of Camus’ The Outsider, because Leonard is certainly that - an awkward loner who doesn’t fit into society or really understand how to or want to fit in - and the story centres around a singular death (there are also more superficial similarities like the beach setting, the length of the novel and both authors’ French nationalities). Yet Leonard knows he made a terrible mistake and the stifling reality of his actions lies slumbering in the shallow end of his subconscious. The question is whether he will be able to get away with his actions and if he should. If you do nothing to prevent someone from dying does that make you a murderer or merely an unfortunate bystander?Translated by Sam Taylor — French author Victor Jestin’s short yet forceful debut novel is part dark coming-of-age novel, part morality tale. Set over the span of a weekend, it tells the story of a 17-year-old who witnesses another teenager dying and chooses not to save his life even though he is able to.