Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Jan 2024
352 pages
Genre: Thrillers
Publication Information
When a catastrophic wildfire suddenly rips through a woman's hometown, she thinks she is lucky to have survived ... until she finds a dead woman in her driveway, clutching a piece of paper with her name on it... .
The blaze came out of nowhere one summer afternoon, a wall of fire fed by blustering wind. Yet, somehow, Alison is alive. She rode out the fire on the damp tiles of her bathroom, her entire body swaddled in a wet woolen blanket. As flames crackled around her, the bitter char of eucalyptus settled in the back of her throat, each breath more desperate than the last.
The wildfire that devastated the Victoria countryside Alison calls home sets in motion a chain of events that threatens to obliterate the carefully constructed life she is living. When Alison emerges from her sheltering place, she spots a soot-covered cherry red car in her driveway, and in it, a dead woman. Alison has never met Simone Arnold in her life ... or so she thinks. So what is she doing here?
As Alison searches for answers across Australia's scorched bushlands, she soon learns that the fire isn't the only threat she's facing... .
"The claustrophobic atmosphere of a raging wildfire is handled well. Fans of Jane Harper's Australian novels will want to try this debut featuring an unreliable narrator."
—Library Journal (starred review)
"Tonally inconsistent and difficult to follow due to flashbacks, this thriller sets up too many subplots to be entirely engaging." —Kirkus Reviews
"Nimbly balancing character study and straight-up mystery, Collins is patient with her reveals, but never at the expense of the book's steady momentum. This is a writer to watch."
—Publishers Weekly
"A vivid, emotionally intense, and satisfyingly cerebral psychological thriller in the manner of Tana French or Gillian Flynn, Collins' sharp and probing debut, with an added environmental message, serves up a complex narrative of exposure and retribution."
—Booklist
"A sense of blooming dread, and the deft, finely painted lines of an artist at work. This close and claustrophobic mystery captures something important about disaster – the way it can crest a hill and we find ourselves woefully unprepared. A finely observed and utterly compulsive read."
—Hayley Scrivenor, bestselling author of Dirt Creek
"Gripping from the first page, this tale of destruction, survival, and mysteries uncovered in the ashes kept me up late into the night."
—Kate Alice Marshall, author of What Lies in the Woods
"Collins writes with incredible pace and precision, knowing exactly when to bring tension to a roiling boil and when to lower it to a suspenseful simmer. Radiant Heat will hook you with its lively prose and thrilling premise, but it's Collins' unflinching portrayal of a woman in grief and rage that'll make it difficult to forget this complex debut."
—Jean Kyoung Frazier, author of Pizza Girl
This information about Radiant Heat was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Sarah-Jane Collins is a writer, editor, and journalist from Meanjin (Brisbane), Australia, who moved to New York by way of Gadigal land (Sydney) and Narrm (Melbourne). Her work has appeared in the Age, the Sydney Morning Herald, Meanjin, Overland, and others. She has an MFA in fiction from Columbia University. Her fiction has won the Overland Fair Australia Prize and been short-listed for other awards. Although New York is home now, she misses the beaches of Australia, but not the spiders.
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