A Great Writer's Sweeping Story of Men and Women Struggling to Reclaim Their Lives in The Aftermath of World Conflict The Great Fireis Shirley Hazzard's first novel sinceThe 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 center 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 Distributed by Syndetic Solutions, Inc.

A new novel from Hazzard is a literary event. It's been two decades between the publication of The Transit of Venus and this magnificent book, but her burnished prose has not diminished in luster nor has her wisdom about the human condition. Two men who have survived WWII and are now enduring the soiled peace, and one 17-year-old woman who has suffered beyond her years, are the characters around whom this narrative revolves. Aldred Leith, 32, the son of a famous novelist and the winner of a military medal for heroism, has come to postwar Japan to observe the conditions there for a book he's writing on the consequences of war within an ancient society. In an idyllic setting above the city of Kure, near Hiroshima, he meets teenaged Helen Driscoll and her terminally ill brother, Ben, who are the poetic children of a loathsome Australian army major and his harridan wife. Leith is drawn to the siblings, who live vicariously in classic literature, and he soon realizes that he's in love with Helen, despite the difference in their ages. Meanwhile, Leith's close friend Peter Exley, who interrogates Japanese war criminals in Hong Kong, faces a decision about what to do with the rest of his life. He dreams of becoming an art historian, but he lacks the courage to make a clean break from the law. When he suddenly acts rashly, the outcome is dreadfully ironic. The leitmotif here is the need for love to counteract the vile wind of history that breeds loss and dislocation. Hazzard writes gently, tenderly, yet with fierce knowledge of how a dearth of love can render lives meaningless. The purity of her sentences, each one resonant with implication, create an effortless flow. This is a quiet book, but one that carries portents well beyond its time and place, suggesting the disquieting state of our current world. (Oct.) Forecast: A certain generation of readers who know Hazzard's work will buy this book with alacrity. Widespread review coverage should generate additional attention. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

In Hazzard's magisterial new work-her first novel since the award-winning Transit of Venus in 1980-the "great fire" (World War II) has already swept the world. In its wake we find Aldred Leith, raised in the Far East by a brilliant Orientalist father and distant mother from whom he is now estranged. Having served in the war and then literally walked across China, Leith arrives in Japan to join the British community managing the Occupation. Death still haunts him-there's the suicide of a servant, for instance, and the fatal illness of Benedict, a young man in the family with whom he is staying-and in fact clearly nothing will be the same after this fire burns itself out. But like those around him, Leith struggles to right himself (partly through his love, initially thwarted, of Ben's sister, Helen), and in the end he finds "a sense of deliverance." This is still a dark book, however; the unease is pervasion. Writing in prose that is restrained and well modulated but freighted with meaning, Hazzard delivers a powerful sense of one generation's loss and of the way we must all cope when the road we take doesn't double back. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 6/15/03.]-Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal" Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information. From: Reed Elsevier Inc. Copyright Reed Business Information

Born on January 30, 1931, in Sydney, Australia, Shirley Hazzard studied at Queenwood College until 1946. After leaving Queenwood, Hazzard went to work for the British Intelligence, Hong Kong Division. Also an employee of the British High Commissioner's Office in Wellington, New Zealand, and a technical assistant to under-developed countries for the United Nations, Hazzard started to write for a living in the early 1960s.

Hazzard's first work as an author, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories, was published by Knopf in 1963. Among some of Hazzard's other works are The Evening of the Holiday, People in Glass Houses: Portraits from Organization Life, The Bay of Noon, and History Countenance of Truth. In her novel The Transit of Venus, Hazzard tells the story of two Australian-born orphaned sisters who make their way to England for a better life.

A Guggenheim fellow in 1974 and the winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1981, Hazzard has lived in Australia, New Zealand, the Far East, The United States, and Italy.

(Bowker Author Biography) Shirley Hazzard's books include "The Evening of the Holiday", "The Bay of Noon", & "The Transit of Venus" (winner of the 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction). She lives in New York City, always maintaining her ties with Italy.

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"The Great Fire is a brilliant, brave, and sublimely written novel that allows the literate reader 'the consolation of having touched infinity.'
This wonderful book, which must be read at least twice simply to savor Hazzard's sentences and set pieces, is among the most transcendent works I've ever had the pleasure of reading."--Anita Shreve
"Shirley Hazzard is, purely and simply, one of the greatest writers working in English today
Which makes me more than grateful to have this long-hoped-for new novel."

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