The Great Fire (Hazzard novel)

The Great Fire (2003) is a novel by the Australian author Shirley Hazzard. It won the U.S. National Book Award for Fiction^[1] and a Miles Franklin literary award (2004). The novel was Hazzard's first since The Transit of Venus, published in 1980.

Overview

The novel commences in

The New Yorker wrote of the novel:

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.

• National Book Award (USA), Fiction, 2003^[1]
• Miles Franklin Literary Award
  , 2004
• William Dean Howells Medal, 2005

Runners up

• Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Fiction, 2004: finalist
• Booker Prize, 2004: longlisted
• Orange Prize
  for Fiction (UK), 2004: shortlisted
• International Dublin Literary Award, 2005: shortlisted

External links

Interviews

• BBC Radio 4 - audio
• The Guardian

Reviews

• The Asian Review of Books
• The Economist
• The Guardian
• Mostly Fiction
• The New York Times
• The Observer
• ReviewsofBooks.com

References