The Great Fire

The year is 1947. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia. In its wake, Aldred Leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency nurtured by war. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley’s life. The men have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. Now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity.
Arriving in Occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb in Hiroshima, Leith meets Benedict and Helen Driscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrannical medical administrator. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Helen, still younger, is inseparable from her brother. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith’s words, delivered by literature. The young people capture Leith’s sympathy; indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted.
A deeply observed story of love and separation, of disillusion and recovered humanity, “The Great Fire” marks the much-awaited return to fiction of an author whose novel “The Transit of Venus” won the National Book Critics Circle Award and, twenty years after its publication, is considered a modern classic.
Shirley Hazzard was born in Australia, and in early years traveled the world with her parents due to their diplomatic postings. At sixteen, living in Hong Kong, she was engaged by British Intelligence, where, in 1947-48, she was involved in monitoring the civil war in China. Thereafter, she lived in New Zealand and in Europe; in the United States, where she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York; and in Italy. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994.
Ms. Hazzard’s previous novels are “The Evening of the Holiday”
dn0 (1966), “The Bay of Noon” (1970), and “The Transit of Venus” (1981). She is also the author of two collections of short fiction, “Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories” (1963) and “People in Glass Houses “(1967). Her nonfiction works include “Defeat of an Ideal “(1973), “Countenance of Truth” (1990), and the memoir” Greene on Capri “(2000). She lives in New York, with sojourns in Italy.