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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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
Paper Book
A masterpiece of the surreal, this stunning novel from Mexico depicts a man's strange quest for his heritage. Beseeched by his dying mother to locate his father, Pedro Páramo, whom they fled from years ago, Juan Preciado sets out for Comala. Comala is a town alive with whispers and shadows--a...
The white tiger
Adiga, Aravind.
Paper Book
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE | Winner of the Booker Prize "This is the authentic voice of the Third World, like you've never heard it before." --John Burdett, author of Bangkok 8 The debut novel from the author of Amnesty and Selection Day<...
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
In this rich novel by the author of the Booker Prize-winning novel "Amsterdam, " a young girl unwittingly tells a tale that turns her family upside down. Brilliant and utterly enthralling in its depiction of childhood, love and war, England and class, "Atonement" is at its center a profound--and...
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 MAJOR NETFLIX FILM starring Lily James, Armie Hammer, Kristin Scott Thomas and Lily Collins. 'The moment I finished this story, I turned to page one and started it over again' MALORIE BLACKMAN 'Excellent entertainment . . . du Maurier created a...
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...
Call me by your name
Aciman, André
Paper Book
Call Me by Your Nameis the story of a sudden and powerful romance that blossoms between an adolescent boy and a summer guest at his parents' cliff-side mansion on the Italian Riviera. Unprepared for the consequences of their attraction, at first each feigns indifference. But during...
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
Henry Townsend, a farmer, boot maker, and former slave, through the surprising twists and unforeseen turns of life in antebellum Virginia, becomes proprietor of his own plantation--as well his own slaves. When he dies, his widow Caldonia succumbs to profound grief, and things begin...
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
From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century comes a groundbreaking novel set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris, about love and the fear of love--"a book that belongs in the top rank of fiction" (The Atlantic). ...
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 classic masterpiece--a triumph of the imagination and one of the bestselling science fiction novels 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...
Disgrace
Coetzee, J. M.
Paper Book
-- Disgrace -- one of only four works of fiction -- was chosen by the editors of the New York Times Book Review as one of the eleven Best Books of the Year -- A New York Times, Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, Newsday, New York Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Village Voice Literary Supplement,...
Mrs Dalloway
Woolf, Virginia
Paper Book
Mrs. Dalloway chronicles a June day in the life of Clarissa Dalloway-a day that is taken up with running minor errands in preparation for a party and that is punctuated, toward the end, by the suicide of a young man she has never met. In giving an apparently ordinary day such immense...
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
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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