Dogs of Summer

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Her moles sucked up all the sunscream and I had to squeeze more out of the yellow bottle of SPF 30 into my right hand and then rub sunscream on her thighs again.

Far away from the island’s posh resorts, two girls dream of hitching a ride down to the beach and escaping their horizonless town. The swallows had been in a frenzy all afternoon, chittering away as Nana and Dad tossed in the debris from that year’s building projects, as well as all the plants they’d weeded out. Sunscream round her neck, sunscream between her fingers, sunscream on her nipples and behind her ears.

When we got to the section of the canal with the lifted-up slabs we could see the whole town, every last bit of it. If Ma and Dad and Nana and Nana’s brother Tío Ovidio and me, meaning everyone who lived in that house, turned on every TV at the same time, I’d feel like the house was exploding and I was flying up, up in the air. e] They feature in the children's novels Tuck Everlasting (1973), [f] and Dog Days (2009) from the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series. The narrator is hyperaware of her friend’s body—her growing breasts, the fact that she already has hair on her vulva. When it’s 22 degrees celsius outside, in minutes the temperature in a car can reach up to 47 degrees celsius.

But she's definitely not jealous that Isora’s mother is dead, nor that Isora's fat, foul-mouthed grandmother has her on a diet, so that she is constantly sticking her fingers down her throat. Aristotle mentions the proverbial heat of the dog days as part of his argument against an early formulation of evolution in his Physics.

I cowered against one of the shelves that was stacked with bottles of Libby’s juice covered in dust and cobwebs.

Isora ran behind the fridgerators and started muttering foquin bitch, foquin bitch, I wish you’d die, you foquin bitch. Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. Readers will be unable to resist the spell of Dogs of Summer, a hilarious, devastating story that is brilliantly attuned to the erotics of friendship, the intoxicating muddle of identification and desire, and the power of both the sublime and the profane. Panza de burro” translates literally to “donkey’s belly” and is an idiomatic expression from the Canary Islands to describe the weather phenomenon of the low hanging, soupy clouds common to the Northern region of Tenerife, where the novel takes place.

She painfully realizes that Isora is growing up faster, but admits that her own sexual desire is fixated on her friend: “Then I’d look at Isora and think about how I couldn’t touch her the way other girls touched and hugged, but maybe I could touch her in ways dat havnt evn been invntd, stroke the backs of her knees with my hand or run my fingers along the scabs that edged her toenails or rub the rolls of flesh that stuck out over her panties. Even though Isora is often the source of Shit’s anxiety, our narrator has a fear of being alienated from Isora. Abreu’s novel, in Julia Sanches’s sparkling translation, is a revelation, perfectly capturing a festering summer of meltdowns and shrinking horizons.

In Andrea Abreu’s novel Dogs of Summer (released August 2, 2022) high atop a mountain near the volcano on the island, two young girls choke on the haze which “hurt our chests to breathe and everything felt heavier than usual, like our sneakers were filled with concrete. Nana put the gofio dough in a bowl and we each tore off a piece, rolled them into little balls and dunked the balls in the runny mojo. As a child I was always very impressed by the fact that my mother had to clean other people's houses while those people went on vacation. This fascination with the body, its excretions, its abject functions, often links closely with our narrator’s burgeoning conceptions of desire.

She said hi to all of them, and for her seeing them wasn’t a big deal or anything, she was famous, she had a minimarket, and if they didn’t say hi back her nan could turn round and not sell them their chorizo sandwiches or their five o’clock Colas, which was when the boys got together after school to smoke weed and eat sarnies and chat on mésinye whenever there were computers available at the cultural centre, which had only got them a few months ago.