Winner of The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize. Fielding Bliss has never forgotten the summer of 1984. The year a heatwave scorched the small town of Breathed, Ohio. The year he became friends with the devil. When a tattered and bruised thirteen-year-old boy turns up in Breathed claiming to be Satan himself, everybody assumes he is just a runaway. But when strange things start happening to the townsfolk, there are some who start to believe that Sal is exactly who he claims to be.