The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard
The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard
List: $24.99 | Sale: $17.50
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The Great Fire

Author: Shirley Hazzard

Narrator: Virginia Leishman

Unabridged: 11 hr 7 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 02/21/2008

Synopsis

The Great Fire is an extraordinary love story set in the immediate aftermath of the great conflagration of 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. 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.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Katie on March 02, 2021

First thing to say is what a stunningly beautifully written book this is. And it's also a poignantly romantic book. The backdrop is the devastation caused by WW2. It begins in Japan in 1947 where Aldred Leith is about to visit Hiroshima. I forget exactly what his job was but he's still in the army a......more

Goodreads review by Simon on July 06, 2009

The only great thing about "The Great Fire" is its name. This is one of those books that as you read it, you find yourself lost in thoughts about the morning commute, the long ago expired and still unpaid decal on your front windshield, about the dog, that you forgot to feed and you now know it repa......more

Goodreads review by Violet on March 07, 2016

Beautiful inspired descriptive prose ultimately betrayed for me by the failure of the writer to fully imagine the character of Helen who throughout the novel came across as the wish fulfillment of an elderly woman rather than any kind of authentic seventeen year old girl and as such seeped way too m......more

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