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
From the Nobel Prize winning novelist, this epic tale of seven generations of the Buendia family spans a hundred years of Latin American history. The brilliant, bestselling, landmark novel chronicles the irreconcilable conflict between the desire for solitude and the need for love--in rich,...
Pedro Páramo
Rulfo, Juan
Paper Book
Winner, Fred Whitehead Award for the Best Design of a Trade Book from Texas Institute of Letters Western Books Exhibition Selection, Rounce & Coffin Club, 2003 Deserted villages of rural Mexico, where images and memories of the past linger like unquiet ghosts, haunted...
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
*Now a six-part TV series starring Natalie Dormer, from Amazon Prime* A 50th-anniversary edition of the landmark novel about three "gone girls" that inspired the acclaimed 1975 film, featuring a foreword by Maile Meloy, author of Do Not Become Alarmed
Atonement
McEwan, Ian
Paper Book
NATIONAL BESTSELLER * A symphonic novel of love and war, childhood and class, guilt and forgiveness that provides all the satisfaction of a brilliant narrative and the provocation we have come to expect from the acclaimed Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author. ...
Rebecca
Du Maurier, Daphne
Paper Book
ONE OF TIME MAGAZINE'S 100 BEST MYSTERY AND THRILLER BOOKS OF ALL TIME * The only hardcover edition of Daphne du Maurier's beloved, internationally best-selling gothic mystery. Rebecca has twice been adapted for film and was named a PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick. ...
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
His first novel to be set largely in the United States, The Ground Beneath Her Feet is Salman Rushdie's celebration of Americana, a brilliant examination of what the world means to America, and what America means to the world. It's his most gripping, boldest and imaginative novel to date - an...
The Known World
Jones, Edward P.
Paper Book
From National Book Award-nominated author Edward P. Jones comes a debut novel of stunning emotional depth and unequaled literary power Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia,...
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...
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 NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE...
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...
Disgrace
Coetzee, J. M.
Paper Book
The provocative Booker Prize winning novel from Nobel laureate, J.M. Coetzee "Compulsively readable... A novel that not only works its spell but makes it impossible for us to lay it aside once we've finished reading it." --The New Yorker At fifty-two, Professor...
Mrs Dalloway
Woolf, Virginia
Paper Book
Mrs Dalloway, created from a series of short stories, is one of Virginia Woolf's best-known novels. Thematically it conveys a rich and genuine humanity, in part through Woolf's use of interior perspectives. This edition provides a substantial introduction, which discusses the composition history of...
Sing, unburied, sing : a novel
Ward, Jesmyn.
Paper Book
*Selected as One of the Best Books of the 21st Century by The New York Times * WINNER of the NATIONAL BOOK AWARD and A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A finalist for the Kirkus Prize, Andrew Carnegie Medal, Aspen Words Literary Prize, and a...
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