The Transit of Venus (King Penguin) - Softcover

Hazzard, Shirley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140057951 ISBN 13: 9780140057959

Publisher: Playboy, 1981

Synopsis

The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard's most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women -- seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal -- becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves.

Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard's novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the eighties; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard traveled the world during her early years, a result of her parents' diplomatic postings. In 1947, at the age of 16, she was engaged by British intelligence to monitor the civil war in China. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994. She has written several novels, two of which were National Book Award Finalists: The Bay of Noon (1971) and The Transit of Venus (1981, available from Penguin). She is also the author of two collections of short stories, and several works of nonfiction including the memoir Greene on Capri. Hazzard's most recent work, The Great Fire, won of the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction and the Miles Franklin Award. She died in 2016.

Review

An almost perfect novel ... Miss Hazard writes as well as Stendhal * NEW YORK TIMES * A dose of the sublime .. I read it with an almost indescribable pleasure. There were sentences that brought tears of gratification to my eyes * NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW * A wonderfully mysterious book ... Both plot and characters are many layered. Unforgettably rich * ANNE TYLER * 'Shirley Hazzard. For me the greatest living writer on goodness and love . . . THE TRANSIT OF VENUS, was described to me by a man who knows as "the greatest novel written in the past 100 years". Having read it, I can see his point. Shirley Hazzard, the quiet, playful, lovestruck artist of love, goodness and death in the 20th century. * Bryan Appleyard *

Edition details

• Publisher: Playboy
• Publication date: 1981
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0140057951
• ISBN 13: 9780140057959
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352