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More than twenty years after the classic
The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard returns to fiction
with a novel that in the words of Ann Patchett "is brilliant
and dazzling..."
The Great Fire is an extraordinary love story set in the
immediate aftermath of the great conflagration of 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. The Great Fire is a
story of love in the aftermath of war by "purely and
simply, one of the greatest writers working in English today." (Michael
Cunningham)
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