The Great Fire

The great fire is the winner of the 2003 national book award for fiction. 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) from the new yorker hazzard is nothing if not discriminating. hierarchies of feeling, perception, and taste abound in her writing, and this novel-her first in more than twenty years-takes on the very notion of what it means to be civilized. the fire of the title refers primarily to the atomic bombing of japan, but also to the possibility of transcendent passion in its aftermath. in 1947, a thirty-two-year-old english war hero visiting hiroshima during the occupation finds himself billeted in a compound overseen by a boorish australian brigadier and his scheming wife. he is immediately enchanted, however, by the couple's children-a brilliant, sickly young man and his adoring sister-who prove to be prisoners in a different sort of conflict. in the ensuing love story, hazzard's moral refinement occasionally veers toward preciosity, but such lapses are counterbalanced by her bracing conviction that we either build or destroy the world we want to live in with our every word and gesture. copyright © 2005the new yorker 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</br>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.” ― ron charles, 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“stunning . . . shirley hazzard has gifted us, in the great fire, a novel of indispensable happiness and sorrow. i loved this novel beyond dreams.”―howard norman, the washington post book world“a classic romance . . . the greatest pleasure is [hazzard’s] subtle and unexpected prose.”―regina marler, los angeles times book review “what bette