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The Great Fire (Paperback)
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- Paperback $13.00
Short Description for The Great FireThe sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict by 'one of the greatest writers working in English today' (Michael Cunningham) and Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.
Full description- Publisher: Virago Press Ltd
- Published: 06 May 2004
- Format: Paperback 320 pages
- See: Full bibliographic data
- Categories: Military Fiction | Second World War
- ISBN 13: 9781844080571 ISBN 10: 1844080579
- Sales rank: 47,017
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Full description for The Great Fire
The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is 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 centre 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.

