When a  great writer recommends a book-and it isn't his own-I always pay close attention, and when Robbie Goolrick, author of the brilliant best-seller, A RELIABLE WIFE, recommended THE GREAT FIRE by Shirley Hazzard, my curiosity was ignited.  THE GREAT FIRE was the 2003 winner of the National Book Award for fiction, and now I know it's going to be a favorite of my book groups.  This is a definite for summer reading.
 
The hero of THE GREAT FIRE is Aldred Leith, who in 1947 is a 32 year old decorated English war veteran.  After traveling through China, his next assignment is near Hiroshima.  There he meets a hostile and boorish Australian couple, the Driscolls, and their 17 year old daughter Helen.  Aldred and Helen fall in love, earning the animosity of her parents, but they're soon separated as Aldred must return to England and the Driscolls leave for New Zealand.  Set against the aftermath of the violence of WWII (Aldred's best friend investigates war criminals) and the unfolding of the Cold War, this novel is a love story pursued across time and continents.  THE GREAT FIRE has received many glowing reviews; the San Francisco Chronicle said,"  This moving, generous story paints love as the greatest rescuer of all-as apt today in our troubling, troubled world as it was 63 years ago."

Shirley Hazzard (born 30 January 1931) is an author of fiction and nonfiction. She was born in Australia, but holds citizenship in Great Britain and the United States.

Hazzard was born in Sydney, Australia, and attended Queenwood School for Girls in Mosman, but left in 1947 to travel through Southeast Asia with her parents. Her first landing was Hiroshima. Her diplomat father took her to Hong Kong, and then she was "brutally removed by destiny" to New Zealand where her father was Australian Trade Commissioner. Hazzard says of her experience of the East that "I began to feel that people could enjoy life, should enjoy life".

Hazzard's early life "was a carbon copy of Helen Driscoll's" (the heroine of The Great Fire). Helen and her brother, the dying Benedict, are described as "wonderfully well-read, a poetic pair who live in literature." Poetry, she says, has always been the centre of her life.

In 1963, Hazzard married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994. As of 2006, she lives in New York City, frequently travelling to her Italian residence in Capri.

Hazzard is best known as the author of four novels and two collections of short fiction, a body of fiction as distinguished as it is small. Her first book, the story collection Cliffs of Fall, was published in 1963. In 1977 her short story "A Long Story Short", originally published in The New Yorker on 26 July 1976, received an O. Henry Award.

The Transit of Venus, her third novel, won the 1980 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Her next novel, The Great Fire, which took her twenty years to write, garnered the 2003 National Book Award and the 2004 Miles Franklin Award. It was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction, longlisted for the 2004 Man Booker Prize, and named a 2003 Book of the Year by The Economist.

In addition to her fiction, Hazzard has written two books critical of the United Nations-Defeat of an Ideal (1973) and Countenance of Truth (1990)-and an account of her friendship with Graham Greene, Greene on Capri: A Memoir (2000). Her most recent work of nonfiction, The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples (2008) is a collection of Hazzard's writings on Naples, Italy, co-authored by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller.

In 1984 the Australian Broadcasting Corporation invited Hazzard to give the Boyer Lectures, a series of radio talks delivered each year by a prominent Australian. The talks were published the following year under the title Coming of Age in Australia.

From The New Yorker

From Booklist

Despite this Australian writer's absence from the world's fiction stage--since the 1981 publication of The Transit of Venus, which earned her great acclaim, including the National Book Critics' Circle Award--her readers have continued to hold hands in devotion and anticipation. Their thrill over her new novel will be completed; the long days and nights of waiting will be forgotten. Time and place have always been exactly evoked in Hazzard's fiction, and such is the case here. The time is 1947-48, and the place is, primarily, East Asia. Obviously, then, this is a locale much altered--by the events of World War II, of course, and, as we see, physical destruction and psychological wariness and weariness lay over the land. Our hero, and indeed he fills the requirements to be called one, is Aldred Leith, who is English and part of the occupation forces in Japan; his particular military task is damage survey. He has an interesting past, including, most recently, a two-year walk across civil-war-torn China to write a book. In the present, which readers will feel they inhabit right along with Leith, by way of Hazzard's beautifully atmospheric prose, he meets the teenage daughter and younger son of a local Australian commander. And, as Helen is growing headlong into womanhood, this novel of war's aftermath becomes a story of love--or more to the point, of the restoration of the capacity for love once global and personal trauma have been shed. Brad Hooper