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., 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. The Great Fire is about both the destructive conflagrations of war and the restorative conflagrations of the heart.

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) The Great Fire is the winner of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction. 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. His counterpart, a young girl living in occupied Japan and tending her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself. At the center of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. Some will fulfill their destinies, others will falter. 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.

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.

The great fire hazzard