Heatwave

Jestin’s charged and chilling debut turns on a stifling vacation that descends from purgatory into a nightmarish inferno. Near the end of 17-year-old narrator Leonard’s stay with his family at a beachside resort in southwest France, Leonard sees another boy, Oscar, attempting to strangle himself on a swing set. Rather than help, Leonard watches him die, then, in a panic, buries the body in the dunes. (“I hadn’t made many stupid mistakes in my 17 years of life,” Leonard reflects in a typical understatement.) There are hints of Leonard’s jealousy over a girl, Luce, whom he’d recently seen kissing Oscar, but Leonard’s callousness is best understood as existential angst: “I had accumulated my hate and anger slowly, patiently.” Leonard then listens to a friend’s libidinous monologues; embarks on a romance with Luce, who is inexplicably drawn to Leonard’s sullen reticence; and rails against the oppressive atmosphere of enforced fun. As Leonard wrestles over whether to come clean, Jestin nicely juxtaposes the eerie fact of the buried body against the round-the-clock party atmosphere at the resort: “It was all too bright, too cheerful, for someone to be dead.” Though not the subtlest portrait of adolescence, Leonard’s curt voice is distinctly effective. Jestin’s memorable vision of a crushing landscape will linger with the reader. (June)