It is a long, hot summer at World's End, a two-family grey stone cottage in the English countryside. Pauline is editing a romance novel in the smaller dwelling, and the larger part is occupied by her daughter, Teresa; Teresa's baby; and her husband, Maurice, a writer, whose infatuation with his editor's girlfriend is growing. Pauline fears for Teresa, who is passionately in love with her husband, for she senses Maurice's imminent betrayal. She remembers a time when her possessive passion for Teresa's father eroded her own youth. A stunning and unexpected denouncement irrevocably changes the order of things for this family, whose intimacy the reader abandons reluctantly at novel's end. "You don't want to part company with these characters, who, time and again, elicit a sensation of intense familiarity." -- "The New Yorker""The work is Jamesian...in its complexities and its carefulness....A lovely, lovely novel." -- Fay Weldon, "Los Angeles Times""Lively knows well the topography of the human heart." -- "People""Absorbingly readable....Ms. Lively evokes the atmosphere of anxiety, suspicion, and frustration with great finesse." -- "Wall Street Journal""Witty, intelligent, and understated...Its conclusion...adds a dash of the unexpected and the delicious to what is otherwise a quiet story, such as most of us live to tell."-- Jonathan Yardley, "Washington Post""A satisfying novel...[Lively] creates a convincing picture of obsessive sexual love tainted by jealousy and misery."-- "Publishers Weekly" (starred review) It is a long, hot summer at World's End, a two-family grey stone cottage in the English countryside. Pauline is editing a romance novel in the smaller dwelling, and the larger part is occupied by her daughter, Teresa; Teresa's baby; and her husband, Maurice, a writer, whose infatuation with his editor's girlfriend is growing. Pauline fears for Teresa, who is passionately in love with her husband, for she senses Maurice's imminent betrayal. She remembers a time when her possessive passion for Teresa's father eroded her own youth. A stunning and unexpected denouncement irrevocably changes the order of things for this family, whose intimacy the reader abandons reluctantly at novel's end. Penelope Lively was born in 1933 in Cairo and spent her childhood there, moving to England in the last year of World War II. She has written many prizewinning novels and collections of short stories for both adults and children, including the novel Moon Tiger, which won England's prestigious Booker Prize in England in 1987, and most recently Heat Wave. She lives in Oxfordshire and London. Heat Wave Novel, a By Lively, Penelope Perennial Copyright © 2004 Penelope Lively All right reserved. ISBN: 0060928557 Chapter One It is an afternoon in early May. Pauline is looking out of the window of her study at World's End. She looks not at the rich green of the field sweeping up to the cool blue of the sky, but at Teresa, who stands outside the cottages with Luke astride her hip, staring up the track towards the road. Pauline sees Teresa with double vision. She sees her daughter, who is holding her own son and waiting for the arrival of her husband. But she sees also an archetypal figure: a girl with a baby, a woman with a child. There is a whole freight of reference there, thinks Pauline. The girl, the child, the sweep of the cornfield, the long furrowed lines of the rough track reaching away to elsewhere. Seen through one lens, Teresa is a Hardy heroine -- betrayed no doubt, a figure of tragedy. Seen through another, she is a lyrical image of youth and regeneration. And for Pauline there shimmers also a whole sequence of intimate references, other versions of Teresa which hitch them both to other days and different places. It is a day in May at World's End, but it is also the extent of two lives -- three fives, if Luke's fifteen months are to be considered. In fact, Teresa is standing where she is for good reason. She has already spotted the glint of the sun on the windscreen of Maurice's car as it turned off the main road, and now indeed here comes the car, creeping in the distance like some sleek dark beast amid the rippling green. And Luke too has seen it. His whole body registers attention and anticipation. He twists his head. He points with all four fingers. 'Da!' he says. 'Da!' Here comes my father, he is announcing. Pauline hears him, through the open window. She too notes the car. She watches its approach, she sees it pull off the track on to the area alongside the cottages that serves as a parking space. Maurice gets out. He kisses Teresa and they go together into the cottage, into their half of the pair of cottages which is World's End. Pauline turns from the window and looks down again at her desk. She picks up her pencil and makes a note on the manuscript in front of her. World's End is itself something of an archetype, and as such is unreliable. It is a grey stone building set on a