The Evening of the Holiday
People in Glass Houses
Cliffs of Fall
The Great Fire
The Transit of Venus
Greene on Capri
The Bay of Noon

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Shirley Hazzard is the acclaimed author of five works of fiction. The Transit of Venus won the National Book Critics' Award while The Great Fire won the National Book Award and the Miles Franklin Award and was shortlisted for the Orange Prize.


The Evening of the Holiday

Passionate undercurrents sweep in and out of this eloquent novel about a love affair in the summer countryside in Italy and its inevitable end. It takes place in a setting of pastoral beauty during a time of celebration -- a festival.

Sophie, half English, half Italian, meets Tancredi, an Italian who is separated from his wife and family. In telling the story of their love affair, author Shirley Hazzard punctures the placid surface of polite Italian society to reveal the intense yearnings and surprising responses in sophisticated people caught up in emotions they do not always understand.


People in Glass Houses

From the author of the award-winning The Great Fire, an extraordinary collection of stories about life in the Organisation - a polyglot crucible in which talent rots and mediocrity thrives and the 'rights of man' are unthinkingly sacrificed on the altar of inter-departmental strife.

The 'People in Glass Houses' work for an American-based concern devoted to 'inflicting improvement' the world over.

Amongst them are sloppy but erudite Algie Wyatt, Swoboda, a Slav DP, who finally rebels against a daily inflow of documentation; modest Ashmole-Brown, whose surprise best-seller unseats Sadie Graine, the all-time corridor fixer; Jaspersen, who falls in and out of love with the Organization; and Clelia Kinslake, who meets the most critical non-crisis of her career in Crete.

Shirley Hazzard's eight dazzling stories are linked by a scorching contempt for the Organization.


Cliffs of Fall

Cliffs of Fall contains ten stories. Moving and evocative, they are sharp, sensitive portrayals of moments of crisis, written with subtlety, humour and a keen understanding of the relationships between men and women.

Whether they are set in the Italian countryside or suburban Connecticut, the stories deal with real people and real problems. In the title piece, a young widow is surprised and ashamed by her lack of grief for her husband. In 'A Place in the Country,' a woman has a passionate, guilty affair with her cousin's husband. In 'Harold,' a gawky, lonely young man finds acceptance and respect through his poetry.

'Miss Hazzard's mind is a revolving light that picks a scene, holds it in utmost clarity for a moment against the surrounding darkness, and moves on' NEW YORK TIMES

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 center 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.

With the looming shadow of world conflict 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.

'I wish there were a set of words like 'brilliant' and 'dazzling' that we saved for only the rarest occasions, so that when I tell you The Great Fire is brilliant and dazzling you would know it is the absolute truth. This is a book that is worth a twenty-year wait' Ann Patchett, author of Bel Canto

'Hazzard painstakingly constructs a compact panorama of a world ravaged by war, in her expert fourth novel . . . One of the finest novels ever written about war and its aftermath, and well worth the 20 year wait' KIRKUS REVIEWS

'One of the greatest writers working in English today' Michael Cunningham