Matthys Levy
9781937667276 tradepaper
$16.95 204 pages
9781937667269 ebook $7.99
Available everywhere books are sold
The world you know is under water —
so where do you go?
In a retirement home on the fringe of Miami after decades of rising seas, the remaining residents struggle with the prospect of being relocated as a hurricane approaches. The story follows an environmental scientist, an engineer, a former ballerina and her husband/manager, a couple obsessed by a comparison to the holocaust, a widow warning about the end of times,
the owner of the home distraught by the consequences of his inescapable loss, and the nurse who looks to a future with a sense of cautious optimism.
All are forced to leave and seek new homes away from the excruciating heat and invading seas. As they move north, they encounter distrust, hardships and masses of refugees competing for the last habitable places on Earth. They also confront an administration unable to find a positive path to the new world resulting in a developing police state with government troops trying to control, often harshly, the movement of the refugees. The characters are all transformed by their experience as some find love, some develop new bonds while others remain resigned to their fate. But all are changed through this voyage of self-discovery as seen from the perspective of an older generation that struggles to process this climate changed
world.
Matthys Levy is the author or co-author of several other highly acclaimed books, including the classic Why Buildings Fall Down and a novel, Building Eden. Heat is his second novel and draws on his knowledge of the causes and effects of climate change.
Reviewer’s Choice: Midwest Book Review
Heat: A Tale of Love and Fear in a Climate-Changed World
Matthys Levy
“Heat” is a prophetic novel that takes for its inherently fascinating storyline a logical extension of what we are now seeing in terms of the dramatic impact of climate change and a warming Earth, the melting of glaciers and the rising of sea levels. While also available for personal reading lists in a digital book format (Kindle, $7.99), “Heat” is an especially and unreservedly recommended addition to community and academic library Disaster Fiction collections.
Editorial Note: Matthys P. Levy (https://patents.justia.com/inventor/matthys-p-levy) is a co-author of Why Buildings Fall Down; Structural Design in Architecture; Why the Earth Quakes, Earthquakes, Volcanoes & Tsunamis; and Engineering the City. He is also the author of Why the Wind Blows: a History of Weather and Global Warming, published in 2007. He published his first novel, Building Eden in 2018. He is a founding director of the Salvadori Center, which teaches New York City youngsters mathematics and science through hands-on learning about the built environment.
Review: Hojjat Adeli, Ohio State University
HEAT by Matthys Levy is a profound and human story that imagines the world responding to climate change by focusing on a group of elderly residents forced to find refuge from a hurricane that threatens the destruction of their home near Miami. In a realistic manner, the author allows you to see and experience the problems faced by these men and women. Not only must they flee north and inland to escape the rising seas and the increasing heat but they are made aware of the hordes of climate refugees hindering their escape. But, this is a human story and focuses on the emotional impact that these events have on a vulnerable section of the population. The characters are well drawn and respond with a variety of emotions experiencing hope, fears and even newfound love during their travels. It is a must-read book for all of us living in a increasingly inhospitable world seeking some hope.
Kevin L Meehan Review
5.0 out of 5 stars A profound and very human story of people facing a climate changed world. Reviewed in the United States on July 16, 2022
HEAT A Tale of Love and Fear in a Climate Changed World is the skillfully spun story of a group of well-educated individuals relocating from their senior living facility in the Miami outskirts to escape the mid-century ravages of climate change. Like Nevil Shute’s apocalyptic novel about a group of individuals in Australia awaiting the spreading cloud of deadly radiation from a nuclear exchange, there is discussion of how things came to their current state. Unlike Shute’s On The Beach here the individuals have options and room for hope.
While the author clearly has a point of view the characters are well drawn and their actions as well as the portrayal of life in 2050’s America is convincing. The retirees’ journeys to their new locations takes place as millions of other climate migrants are making their own journeys to higher and cooler ground and as States and the Federal government are enacting restrictions on their movement. Climate migrants in most cases must have proof that they have secured a place to go to before being permitted to travel through various governmental checkpoints.
An easy and pleasurable read, HEAT leaves the reader with a fuller and more profound understanding of how the snowballing effects of climate change will affect even a country as rich as the United States in just a few decades. I found that by the end I was calculating how old my children and potential grandchildren will be in 2050. Is there time to save the earth for these children and grandchildren? The author, while providing a basis for hope, believes that today the answer is uncertain. I recommend that you read Heat and draw your own conclusions.
review by Irene Schreier Scott
The remarkable thing about this newly-published novel by Matthys Levy, subtitled “A Tale of Love and Fear in a Climate-Changed World”, is that the author makes this terrifying topic enjoyable reading. He accomplishes this by using a mature love story as the vehicle of conveying his serious, scientific grasp of the subject matter.
“Heat” takes place in the coming century; yet as we, in the present, watch so much described happening, or very nearly happening, it almost feels as if that future is very close. We become acquainted with the inhabitants of “Manor”, a retirement home near Miami, at the time they are forced by continual flooding to flee from it.
They hope to move North, where life still seems possible. With foresight, the author describes masses fleeing from the southern part of our continent, often met by hostility and increasingly brutal authoritarianism. By luck and perseverance, our friends find ways of coping. Their various experiences are used by the author to end the story by implying some of the most ingenious and scientifically advanced possible methods of averting catastrophe; this ray of hope, the chance that our fictional friends as well as our own, the readers’ descendants may yet continue life on our planet, ends *HEAT on a positive note.
Highly recommended for realists as well as human-caused Climate-change deniers!