The Great Fire
Shirley HazzardAfter conflict comes the struggle to reclaim humanity. And, at the centre of it all, a love story, in Shirley Hazzard’s sweeping drama.
“Beauty is felt in almost every line of this austerely gorgeous work.” — Chicago Tribune
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 to dream again. Some will fulfil 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.
“So majestic in scope and so sophisticated in diction it evokes a rhapsodic gratitude in the reader...Calls to mind the writerly command of A.S. Byatt, Lawrence Durrell, Nadine Gordimer, and Graham Greene.” — The San Diego Union-Tribune
Shirley Hazzard wrote works of fiction and non-fiction. Her family moved from Australia to Hong Kong where, at the age of 16, she began working for the British Combined Intelligence Services. At 20 she moved to New York and there she worked for the United Nations throughout much of the 1950s, which included a posting to Naples. Her last novel, The Great Fire, won the 2003 National Book Award for fiction.
Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2004