When recently orpahned Woodley Sharpless encounters Ben Pinkerton - known to all as 'Trouble' - for the first time at the exclusive Blaze Academy, he is instantly enraptured. They are polar opposites: Ben is exotic and daring; Woodley is bookish and frail, yet their lives quickly become inextricable linked. First at school, then in the staccato days of twenties New York, Woodley sees flashes of another person in his friend and slowly discovers a side of Ben's nature that reveals his dark and hidden history.

But as the curtain falls on the frivolity of the twenties and rises to reveal the cruelty of a new decade, Woodley and Ben's friendship begins to fragment. Over the coming years the two men meet intermittently: in Japan before the outbreak of the Second World War and then again amidst the furore of the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Change in both their lives, their relationship and their suffering, stand for a generation marked by depression and upheaval, brutality and confusion. The Heat of the Sun is an ambitious and assured novel that captures perfectly two friends, two loves: two lives.