The Summer That Melted Everything

Fielding Bliss has never never forgotten the summer of 1984: the year a heatwave scorched the small town of Breathed, Ohio. The year he became friends with the devil.

When local prosecutor Autopsy Bliss publishes an invitation to the devil to come to the country town of Breathed, Ohio, nobody quite expects that he will turn up. They especially don’t expect him to turn up as a tattered and bruised thirteen-year-old boy.

Fielding, the son of Autopsy, finds the boy outside the courthouse and brings him home, and he is welcomed into the Bliss family. The Blisses believe the boy, who calls himself Sal, is a runaway from a nearby farm town. Then, as a series of strange incidents implicate Sal — and riled by the feverish heatwave baking the town from the inside out — there are some around town who start to believe that maybe Sal is exactly who he claims to be.

But whether he’s a traumatised child or the devil incarnate, Sal is certainly one strange fruit: he talks in riddles, his uncanny knowledge and understanding reaches far outside the realm of a normal child — and ultimately his eerily affecting stories of Heaven, Hell, and earth will mesmerise and enflame the entire town.

Devastatingly beautiful, The Summer That Melted Everything is a captivating story about community, redemption, and the dark places where evil really lies.

PRAISE FOR TIFFANY MCDANIEL

‘There’s more than an echo of To Kill a Mockingbird here … though Fielding’s journey from innocence to experience is a whole lot darker than Scout’s … Atmosphere is key when it comes to southern gothic, and the summer heat licks like hellfire through McDaniel’s pages … The Summer That Melted Everything is a genuinely unnerving, deliciously dark tale of the evil that lies in ordinary people.’ The Independent

‘Gently written, allegorical, domestic, with myths of the underworld explored like never before through the eyes of a man looking back on his sins. One of the most beautiful books of the year.’ The Listener