Heat Wave

It is a long, hot summer at World's End, a two-family gray stone cottage in the English countryside. Pauline is editing a romance novel. Pauline is in the smaller dwelling of the cottage and her daughter Teresa, the baby and her husband Maurice occupied the large part. Maurice a writer is infatuated with his editor's girlfriend it is growing. Pauline fears for Teresa, who is passionately in love with her husband, for she senses Maurice's imminent betrayal. She remembers a time when her possessive passions for Teresa's father eroded her own youth. A stunning and unexpected denouement irrevocably changes the order of things for this family, whose intimacy the reader abandons reluctantly at novel's end. SC, 215 pages.