From F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby to Michael Chabon’s The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, there’s a long tradition of writing about eventful summers where personal crises unfold across long days and languid nights. Ronnie Scott’s The Adversary is a summer novel about young people exploring their sexuality and sociability. Madeleine Watts’s The Inland Sea is the story of a young woman’s fraught final summer in Sydney. Rebecca Harkins-Cross asks two these exciting young authors about how the intensity, transience and torpor of the season plays a role in their new novels and in literature at large.