The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard’s first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. At the centre of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in Occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself.
In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia’s coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity.
- 'A brilliant, brave and sublimely written novel … among the most transcendent works I've ever had the pleasure of reading' Anita Shreve 'Exquisitely crafted … the most interesting work of fiction published this year' Books of the Year, The Economist 'A profound and austerely gorgeous meditation on the fading of Empire' Books of the Year, Telegraph 'The writing is a lesson to us all' Colm Tobin, Irish Times
Paperback:
£7.99
Published 06/05/2004
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