Published in 1980
352 pages
Author of fiction and non-fiction. Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard now holds citizenship in Great Britain and the United States.
As a child she travelled the world due to her parents’ diplomatic postings and at 16, worked for the British Intelligence in Hong Kong, monitoring civil war in China. After this she lived in New Zealand, Europe, USA and Italy. In the USA she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York.
Since leaving this post she has been a full-time writer and passionate opponent of the United Nations, the subject of her book Defeat of an Ideal: A Study of the Self-Destruction of the United Nations (1973). She has also written non-fiction books Countenance of Truth: the United Nations and the Waldheim Case (1990) about the Kurt Waldheim case, and Greene on Capri: A Memoir (2000) about her friend, Graham Greene. In 1985, Coming of Age in Australia was published, a collection of her Australian Broadcasting Corporation Boyer lectures.
Hazzard’s writing is as elegant and controlled as ever and this, rather than the plot, dominates her work. Her works of fiction include five novels: The Evening of the Holiday (1966); People in Glass Houses (1967); The Bay of Noon (1970); The Transit of Venus (1980); and most recently, after a break of over 20 years, The Great Fire (2003). This book was shortlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize for Fiction and the 2005 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award.
Shirley Hazzard lives in New York.
What is this book about?
Caro, gallant and adventurous, is one of two Australian sisters who have come to post-war England to seek their fortunes. Courted long and hopelessly by young scientist, Ted Tice, she is to find that love brings passion, sorrow, betrayal and finally hope. The milder Grace seeks fulfilment in an apparently happy marriage. But as the decades pass and the characters weave in and out of each other’s lives, love, death and two slow-burning secrets wait in ambush for them.
