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 at 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.

Buy The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard at attic books nairobi kenya||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard price in nairobi||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard price at attic books||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard||where to buy The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard in nairobi||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard official book||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard discounted price||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard book summary||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard book review||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard book overview||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard edition||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard quotes||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard themes||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard pdf||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard free pdf download||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard paperback||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzardhardcover||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard audiobook||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard ebook||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard original book|The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzardonline hardcopy||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard study guide||The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard availability in nairobi||

Book details

• Format Paperback
• Pages326 pages
• LanguageEnglish
• ISBN100312423586
• ISBN139780312423582