Oscar is dead because I watched him die and did nothing

An Evening Standard 'Best New Book' of 2021

‘A short, sharp, shock of a novel… beautifully done’ Daily Mail
'The modern day successor to Francoise Sagan' Evening Standard
‘Jestin evokes adolescent turmoil with great delicacy and poignancy’ Times Literary Supplement
'The Summer Page-Turner You Have To Read' Waterstones

Winner of the Prix de la vocation 2019
Winner of the Prix Femina de lycéens 2019
Longlisted for the Crime Writers Association 'Crime Fiction in Translation Dagger' 2022

Translated by Sam Taylor, translator of Lullaby by Leila Slimani, The Truth about the Harry Quebert Affair by Joël Dicker and HHhH by Laurent Binet

Leonard is an outsider, a seventeen-year-old uncomfortable in his own skin who is forced to endure a family camping holiday in the South of France. Tired of awkwardly creeping out of beach parties after only a couple of beers, he chooses to spend the final Friday night of the trip in bed. However, when he cannot sleep due to the sound of wild carousing outside his tent, he gets up and goes for a walk.

As he wanders among the dunes, he sees Oscar, one of the cooler kids, drunk in a playground, hanging by his neck from the ropes of a swing. Frozen into inaction, he watches Oscar struggle to breathe until finally his body comes loose and falls lifeless to the ground. Unable to think straight, he buries Oscar in the sand and returns to the campsite where, oppressed by the ferocious heat and the weight of what he did and did not do, he will try to spend the remaining hours of the holiday as if nothing had happened.

Told over the space of a long weekend, this intense and brilliant novel is the story of an adolescent struggling to fit in. Heatwave is a gripping psychological thriller that poses the existential question:

Is doing nothing sometimes the very worst thing you can do?

PRAISE FOR HEATWAVE:

"This is a searingly vivid novel that depicts the torments of adolescence in a sensual, carnal way. But it is also a profound meditation on the mystery of evil, our deadly urges, and the savagery that lies deep within each of us. I loved the writing, which is spare but highly evocative, and I admired the way that the author used the enclosed world of the campsite to fuel the claustrophobic tension that mounts throughout." Leila Slimani, author of Lullaby

‘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

‘Eerie, propulsive, sexy, and unsettling, Victor Jestin’s Heatwave carries the coming-of-age novel into darkly surprising new territory. With echoes of the films of Francois Ozon, this intense, slim novel is a hot summer read that lingers long after you finish the last page’ Laura Sims, author of Looker

‘A fiery page-turner’ Entertainment Weekly

‘Jestin’s charged and chilling debut turns on a stifling vacation that descends from purgatory into a nightmarish inferno’ Publishers Weekly



‘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

‘For his first novel, Victor Jestin displays a stunning literary talent. It’s short, pitiless, polished, perfectly realized’ Livres Hebdo

‘Every page burns your fingers’ Le Figaro Magazine


‘The young author of this first novel keeps all promises, with writing of a rare precision, mature and carnal... Moving and cinematic’ La Vie

‘At 25, Victor Jestin makes his mark with an unsettling first novel’ Elle

‘An author so young, who succeeds in creating such a powerful fable, demands to be followed’ Lire

‘A sensual first novel that’s remorseless about the end of innocence’ Le Vif L’Express

‘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

‘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

‘Victor Jestin portrays with cruel exactitude the throes of an adolescent trapped in a secret too heavy to bear’ L’Obs

‘At 25, Victor Jestin has written a Sagan-like novel. A Francoise Sagan of today under high heat, in the full sense of the word’ Le Parisien Dimanche

‘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

‘You devour this book, but its effects linger, so strongly does it reverberate with destinies sacrificed to the yawn of the void’ Le Point