The Hottest State - Softcover

Hawke, Ethan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0006550479 ISBN 13: 9780006550471

Publisher: Flamingo, 2010

Synopsis

A beautifully crafted debut from one of the brightest young stars of American cinema.

There’s nothing more exhilarating than falling in love for the first time. And nothing more confusing...

‘William is 20; sexy, confident and easy. Then he meets Sarah and falls in love, and his confidence and ease, upon which his sexiness rests, are called into question. Sarah is troubled, obviously so, but William is so besotted he fails to notice or to care... Obsessive first love is an enduring – and difficult – subject for first-time novelists, but Hawke has managed to encapsulate well the characteristics of a love affair doomed by one-sidedness and the psychological breakdown which follows it... His writing is searingly open; his prose, full of freshness of love and the agony of loss, is beguiling. The Hottest State captures beautifully the awfulness of being captured.’ Mary Loudon, The Times

About this title

Review:

‘A sharp, moving tale’
Company

‘A lust story that crackles and burns like a firework... a likeable book, nicely filled with meditations on absent fathers, doubts about masculinity and a cast of feckless characters who have more hang-ups than a cloakroom.’
Esquire

‘The ideal gift for that ever-so-slightly-self-absorbed young person of your dreams.’
GQ

‘An impressive debut’
Daily Telegraph

From the Back Cover:

With disarming emotional honesty, Ethan Hawke's first novel captures that agitated, electric moment between youth and adulthood when every new feeling becomes a source of mystery and wonder, and every experience seems overlaid with staggering possibility or certain doom. Hawke's narrator will be disconcertingly familiar to anyone who has ever felt the fierceness of young love: Meeting Sarah catapults William into a world of shame and ardor and unspeakable tenderness, and in six head-spinning months he comes to know both the restless, overmastering ache of first love and the wild and ruinous grief it leaves behind.

About this edition

• Publisher: Flamingo
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0006550479
• ISBN 13: 9780006550471
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 208