Literary Heatwaves

When the heat rises in fiction, so too do tempers, tensions and the promise of an inevitable reckoning. We’ve curated a collection of summer-soaked literary reads, available to borrow and inspired by Melbourne’s summer heat as the season draws to a close.


Updated January 21, 2026
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Literary Heatwaves

When the heat rises in fiction, so too do tempers, tensions and the promise of an inevitable reckoning. We’ve curated a collection of summer-soaked literary reads, available to borrow and inspired by Melbourne’s summer heat as the season draws to a close.


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One Hundred Years of Solitude
Marquez, Gabriel Garcia.
Paper Book
Now a Netflix original series! "One Hundred Years of Solitude is the first piece of literature since the Book of Genesis that should be required reading for the entire human race. . . . García Márquez has done nothing less than to create in the reader a sense of all that is profound,...
Pedro Páramo
Rulfo, Juan
Audiobook
The white tiger
Adiga, Aravind.
Paper Book
Introducing a major literary talent,The White Tiger offers a story of coruscating wit, blistering suspense, and questionable morality, told by the most volatile, captivating, and utterly inimitable narrator that this millennium has yet seen. Balram Halwai is a complicated man. Servant. Philosopher....
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Lindsay, Joan
Paper Book
The classic novel about the disappearance of three boarding school girls that inspired the acclaimed film   It was a cloudless summer day in the year 1900. Everyone at Appleyard College for Young Ladies agreed it was just right for a picnic at Hanging Rock. After lunch, a...
Atonement
McEwan, Ian
Paper Book
On the hottest day of the summer of 1935, thirteen-year-old Briony Tallis sees her older sister Cecilia strip off her clothes and plunge into the fountain in the garden of their country house. Watching Cecilia is their housekeeper’s son Robbie Turner, a childhood friend who, along with Briony&...
The talented Mr Ripley
Highsmith, Patricia.
Paper Book
It's here, in the first volume of Patricia Highsmith's five-book Ripley series, that we are introduced to the suave Tom Ripley, a young striver seeking to leave behind his past as an orphan bullied for being a "sissy." Newly arrived in the heady world of Manhattan, Ripley meets a wealthy...
Rebecca
Du Maurier, Daphne
Paper Book
Now a Netflix film starring Lily James and Kristin Scott Thomas "Last Night I Dreamt I went to Manderley Again..." With these words, the reader is ushered into an isolated gray stone mansion on the windswept Cornish coast, as the second Mrs. Maxim de Winter recalls the...
Valley of the dolls
Susann, Jacqueline
Paper Book
The 50th Anniversary Edition of Jacqueline Susann's All-Time Pop-Culture Classic The perfect gift for any Valley fan or your favorite Doll, featuring a new cover design * introduction by Simon Doonan * never-before-seen archival material * an essay from Jackie, "My Book Is...
Call me by your name
Aciman, André
Paper Book
Now a Major Motion Picture from Director Luca Guadagnino, Starring Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet, and Written by Three-Time Oscar(tm) Nominee James Ivory The Basis of the Oscar-Winning Best Adapted Screenplay A New York Times...
The virgin suicides
Eugenides, Jeffrey.
Paper Book
The national bestseller from Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize-Winning Author of Middlesex and The Marriage Plot With a New Introduction by Emma Cline Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin...
The great Gatsby
Fitzgerald, F. Scott; Marchetta, Melina
Paper Book
The only edition of the beloved classic that is authorized by Fitzgerald's family and from his lifelong publisher. This edition is the enduring original text, updated with the author's own revisions, a foreword by his granddaughter, and with a new introduction by National Book...
The ground beneath her feet
Rushdie, Salman
Paper Book
Salman Rushdie's most ambitious and accomplished novel, sure to be hailed as his masterpiece. At the beginning of this stunning novel, Vina Apsara, a famous and much-loved singer, is caught up in a devastating earthquake and never seen again by human eyes. This is her story, and...
The Known World
Jones, Edward P.
Paper Book
Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize Award and recognized as the best book of fiction in the 21st century by the New York Times, Edward P. Jones's The Known World is a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power and continues to show its importance to the American literary...
The god of small things
Roy, Arundhati.
Paper Book
BOOKER PRIZE WINNER * NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * An affluent Indian family is forever changed by one fateful day in 1969, from the author of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness and Mother Mary Comes to Me "[The God of Small Things] offers such...
Giovanni's room
Baldwin, James
Paper Book
Set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, this groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love is "a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction" (The Atlantic). * Presented here in stunning hardcover and with an Introduction by Colm Tóibín, New York Times...
James
Everett, Percival
Paper Book
PULITZER PRIZE WINNER * #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER * A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and darkly humorous, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view * In development as a feature film to be...
Dune
Herbert, Frank
Paper Book
Frank Herbert's epic masterpiece--a triumph of the imagination and the bestselling science fiction novel of all time. Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of Paul Atreides--who would become known as Muad'Dib--and of a great family's ambition to bring to...
Mrs Dalloway
Woolf, Virginia
Paper Book
Some 70 years after its original publication, and following on the heels of the remarkable film adaptations of Orlando and A Room of One's Own, a film version worthy of Mrs. Dalloway's startling originality and fresh view of a woman's life has been conceived and made.
Sing, unburied, sing : a novel
Ward, Jesmyn.
Paper Book
*WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD for FICTION *A TIME MAGAZINE BEST NOVEL OF THE YEAR and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 OF 2017 *Finalist for the Kirkus Prize *Finalist for the Andrew Carnegie Medal *Finalist for the Aspen Words Literary Prize...
To the lighthouse
Woolf, Virginia
Paper Book
"A classic for a reason. My mind was warped into a new shape by her prose and it will never be the same again." -- Greta Gerwig The authorized, original edition of one of the great literary masterpieces of the twentieth century: a miraculous novel of family, love, war, and mortality,...
Crazy rich Asians
Kwan, Kevin
Paper Book
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The international sensation and blockbuster Hollywood rom com. * "A Pride and Prejudice-like send-up about an heir bringing his Chinese-American girlfriend home to meet his ancestor-obsessed family." --People   ...
Jaws
Benchley, Peter
Paper Book
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * The shark-versus-man classic that inspired the blockbuster Steven Spielberg movie--now in a fiftieth anniversary edition with an exclusive foreword from the author's wife, renowned ocean conservation advocate Wendy Benchley "A tightly written,...
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