The Great Fire

Shirley Hazzard's "brilliant and dazzling" (Ann Patchett) National Book Award-winning novel of love after war. Shirley Hazzard wrote of ravaged worlds that remained grandly romantic despite the forces of their time. The Great Fire, her final novel, which won the National Book Award, surveys the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when veterans of devastation, still in their youth, must reinvent their lives and learn to dream again. The unlikely couple at the book’s center—a soldier and a young girl, each on the brink of self-discovery—seek to reclaim their humanity. More than twenty years since its initial publication, The Great Fire remains a shining example of the best of Hazzard: her deep worldliness; her rich evocation of love and war, idealism and reality; and the timeless beauty of her astute intelligence, wit, and observation.