The Transit of Venus - Softcover

Hazzard, Shirley

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140107479 ISBN 13: 9780140107470

Publisher: Penguin, 1990

Synopsis

The masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016), The Transit of Venus won the National Book Critics' Circle Award and was a finalist for the National Book Award. 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

Review:

"The Transit of Venus is maybe a perfect novel." --Rumaan Alam, The New York Times Book Review (podcast)

"I cannot think of a more elegant writer. To me she personifies the word exquisite. . . . It's the inner landscapes, the kind of minute, almost inevitable gestures and impulses that comprise human interaction that she's just so brilliant at registering, and in this sense I think she's truly the heir to Henry James. She's just such a treat." --Emily Eakin, The New York Times Book Review (podcast)

Book Description:

Reissue of this highly acclaimed Virago title, a 'finely written, beautiful and tragic novel' - Hermione Lee, FT

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1990
• ISBN 10: 0140107479
• ISBN 13: 9780140107470
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352