She lives in New York, with sojourns in Italy.
Her nonfiction works include Defeat of an Ideal (1973), Countenance of Truth (1990), and the memoir Greene on Capri (2000). She is also the author of two collections of short fiction, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). Hazzard's previous novels are The Evening of the Holidayĭn0 (1966), The Bay of Noon (1970), and The Transit of Venus (1981). In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994. Thereafter, she lived in New Zealand and in Europe in the United States, where she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York and in Italy. At sixteen, living in Hong Kong, she was engaged by British Intelligence, where, in 1947-48, she was involved in monitoring the civil war in China. Shirley Hazzard was born in Australia, and in early years traveled the world with her parents due to their diplomatic postings. The young people capture Leith's sympathy indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted.Ī deeply observed story of love and separation, of disillusion and recovered humanity, The Great Fire marks the much-awaited return to fiction of an author whose novel The Transit of Venus won the National Book Critics Circle Award and, twenty years after its publication, is considered a modern classic. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith's words, delivered by literature. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity.Īrriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb in Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator. The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley's life. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency nurtured by war. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia.
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