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The Great Fireby Shirley Hazzard
AwardsWinner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction
Staff Pick
The Great Fire is one of the most sophisticated novels I’ve read in years. Beautiful writing and acute psychological insights.
You may already be familiar with some of the fanfare associated with Shirley Hazzard's novel The Great Fire, as it was her first novel in twenty years. Aldred Leith is one of those living in what's left of the Pacific Theatre in the years immediately following WWII, a region beginning to teem once again after surviving the unspeakable (though, try as they may, unforgettable) events of the war culminating in the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Despite all of that, there is still love to be had that, while fragile, serves to foster new life, hope, and even joy. Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments: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) Review:"Shirley Hazzard has written an hypnotic novel that unfolds like a dream: Japan, Southeast Asia, the end of one war and the beginning of another, the colonial order gone, and at the center of it all, a love story." Joan Didion Review:"I wish there were a set of words like 'brilliant' and 'dazzling' that we saved for only the rarest occasions, so that when I tell you The Great Fire is brilliant and dazzling you would know it is the absolute truth. This is a book that is worth a twenty-year wait." Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto Review:"[T]his almost indescribably rich story...moves from strength to strength, and no reader will be unmoved by its sorrowing, soaring eloquence. One of the finest novels ever written about war and its aftermath, and well worth the 23-year wait." Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) Review:"[Her fans'] thrill over [Hazzard's] new novel will be completed; the long days and nights of waiting will be forgotten....Time and place have always been exactly evoked in Hazzard's fiction, and such is the case here....[B]eautifully atmospheric prose..." Brad Hooper, Booklist Review:"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, author of The Last Time They Met Synopsis:A finalist for the National Book Award, this is an extraordinary love story set in the immediate aftermath of World War II. A man and woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, and struggle to reclaim their humanity. Synopsis:Finalist for the National Book Award, this is an extraordinary love story set in the immediate aftermath of the great conflagration of the Second World War. 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. About the AuthorShirley Hazzard is the author, most recently, of Greene on Capri, a memoir of Graham Greene, and several works of fiction, including The Evening of the Holiday, The Bay of Noon, and The Transit of Venus, winner of the 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award. She lives in New York City and Capri. What Our Readers Are SayingAdd a comment for a chance to win!
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