The Great Fire (novel)

The Great Fire is the 2003 National Book Award winning novel by the Australian author Shirley Hazzard. It also won a 2004 Miles Franklin literary award.

Overview

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.

Awards

• William Dean Howells Medal, 2005
• International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, 2005: shortlisted
• Kiriyama Pacific Rim Book Prize, Fiction, 2004: finalist
• Miles Franklin Literary Award, 2004: winner
• Orange Prize for Fiction (UK), 2004: shortlisted
• Man Booker Prize, 2004: longlisted
• National Book Award (USA), Fiction, 2003: winner

External links

Google books

• The Great Fire

Interviews

• BBC Radio 4 [1] - audio
• "The Guardian" [2]

Reviews

• "The Asian Review of Books" [3]
• "The Guardian" [4]
• "Mostly Fiction" [5]
• "The New York Times" [6]
• "The Observer" [7]
• "ReviewsofBooks.com" [8]