“The heat came with the devil. It was the summer of 1984, and while the devil had been invited, the heat had not. It should've been expected, though. Heat is, after all, the devil's name, and when's the last time you left home without yours?”

Believe the hype; this one is will grip you and ring out your last remaining emotion and then use you to mop all the feels back up, only to start the process all over.

The premise is simple enough. The Devil is invited to a small American town called Breathed during the summer of 1984. A young black boy turns up claiming to be Satan and with his arrival comes a heatwave. The boy finds a new family, the townsfolk grow slowly insane with the heat and then the journalists arrive.

The story is told from a 13-year-old boy Fielding's perspective, told both during the memorable summer and as a serious of flashback on his life remembered in the present day told as an old man. It becomes pretty clear from adult Fielding’s life that something terrible happened that summer. This is a story of 1984, its racism and its homophobia. It is a coming of age and the loss of innocence of a boy and a town.

Recommended to fans of literary fiction who like poetic language, larger than life characters and who are not afraid of a tearful ending.