by Nino Ricci
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Product Description
From Booklist
Despite this Australian writer's absence from the world's fiction stage--since the 1981 publication of The Transit of Venus, which earned her great acclaim, including the National Book Critics' Circle Award--her readers have continued to hold hands in devotion and anticipation. Their thrill over her 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. The time is 1947-48, and the place is, primarily, East Asia. Obviously, then, this is a locale much altered--by the events of World War II, of course, and, as we see, physical destruction and psychological wariness and weariness lay over the land. Our hero, and indeed he fills the requirements to be called one, is Aldred Leith, who is English and part of the occupation forces in Japan; his particular military task is damage survey. He has an interesting past, including, most recently, a two-year walk across civil-war-torn China to write a book. In the present, which readers will feel they inhabit right along with Leith, by way of Hazzard's beautifully atmospheric prose, he meets the teenage daughter and younger son of a local Australian commander. And, as Helen is growing headlong into womanhood, this novel of war's aftermath becomes a story of love--or more to the point, of the restoration of the capacity for love once global and personal trauma have been shed. Brad Hooper
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
Review
“Beauty is felt in almost every line of this austerely gorgeous work.” —Chicago Tribune
“So majestic in scope and so sophisticated in diction it evokes a rhapsodic gratitude in the reader...Calls to mind the writerly command of A.S. Byatt, Lawrence Durrell, Nadine Gordimer, and Graham Greene.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
"The last masterpiece of a vanished age of civility."--The Wall Street Journal
"[The Great Fire] sails into port like a magnificent ship of fiction from another era."--Entertainment Weekly
"The Great Fire is about both the destructive conflagrations of war and the restorative conflagrations of the heart. Hazzard’s moving, generous story paints love as the greatest rescuer of all—as apt today in our troubling, troubled world as it was 55 years ago."--San Francisco Chronicle
“Hazzard writes with an extraordinary command of geography and time.... Flashes of violence cut through the contemplative narrative, but in her exquisitely cut sentences, hazzard concentrates on the subtler movements of these hearts cauterized by violence."--The Christian Science Monitor
"A 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, author of Where I Was From
“So majestic in scope and so sophisticated in diction it evokes a rhapsodic gratitude in the reader...Calls to mind the writerly command of A.S. Byatt, Lawrence Durrell, Nadine Gordimer, and Graham Greene.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
"The last masterpiece of a vanished age of civility."--The Wall Street Journal
"[The Great Fire] sails into port like a magnificent ship of fiction from another era."--Entertainment Weekly
"The Great Fire is about both the destructive conflagrations of war and the restorative conflagrations of the heart. Hazzard’s moving, generous story paints love as the greatest rescuer of all—as apt today in our troubling, troubled world as it was 55 years ago."--San Francisco Chronicle
“Hazzard writes with an extraordinary command of geography and time.... Flashes of violence cut through the contemplative narrative, but in her exquisitely cut sentences, hazzard concentrates on the subtler movements of these hearts cauterized by violence."--The Christian Science Monitor
"A 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, author of Where I Was From
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First Sentence
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
NOW THEY WERE STARTING. Read the first page
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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
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