title: The Heat of the Sun: A Novel
author:  David Rain 
description: What happened to the characters in Puccinis opera Madama Butterfly after Cio-Cio-Sans suicide? Australian author Rain imagines some answers in his first novel. For starters, Pinkerton is now a powerful U.S. senator. His wife, Kate, is an minence grise, and his illegitimate son, Trouble, is now a student at a private school. There he is befriended by the novels narrator, a boy named Woodley Sharpless, whose late father had been the U.S. consul in Nagasaki when Pinkerton and Cio-Cio-San were an item. Other characters from the opera make at least cameo appearances as well. There are two main themes to the ensuing story: one is the story of the lifelong, and occasionally troubled, friendship of Woodley and Trouble; the second is Japan during the 1930s and early 40s as seen through the eyes of the two friends. Though occasionally frustrating in the opaqueness of the many characters relationships and of unresolved plot points, Rains novel is dramatic, even operatic, and an engaging read, especially for opera buffs. --Michael Cart
zlib_text: Copyright © 2010 by Isabel Wilkerson
  All rights reserved.
  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House
  Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
  Our title The Warmth of Other Suns is taken from the �nal pages of the unrestored edition of
  Black Boy by Richard Wright. Used by permission.
  Permissions acknowledgments for previously published material can be found beginning on
  this page.
  eISBN: 978-0-679-60407-5
  www.atrandom.com
  v3.1
  
   
  To my mother and
   
  to the memory of my father,
   
  whose migration made me possible,
   
  and to the millions of others like them
   
  who dared to act upon their dreams
   
  
   
   
  I was leaving the South
   
  To �ing myself into the unknown.…1
   
  I was taking a part of the South
   
  To transplant in alien soil,
   
  To see if it could grow di�erently,
   
  If it could drink of new and cool rains,
   
  Bend in strange winds,
   
  Respond to the warmth of other s