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Upcoming Books:
October 24
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard
November/December
Monuments Men by Robert Edsel

Author Quotes: “I wanted to write, perhaps, a story of falling in love. I wanted to be as true as possible to a phenomenon now passing away from our society: the accidental meeting of man and woman and a sense of destined engagement that would possibly last out their lives. This, to serve as a counterweight to the huge disillusion of a ravaged world. I will let myself in for derision, whatever I say on this thee. I suppose. Yet I think that such a story is not necessarily idealized, and that the dream, at least, of such love still supplies the poetry of all manner of unpoetic lives.” 
― Shirley Hazzard, interview with J.D. McClatchy, The Paris Review (Spring 2005)

Author Bio:

Shirley Hazzard (born 30 January 1931) is an Australian author of fiction and non-fiction. She was born in Australia, but holds citizenship of Great Britain and theUnited States.[1] Hazzard was born in Sydney 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.[4] Her diplomat father took her to Hong Kong, and then she was "brutally removed by destiny"[5] 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".[5]
- from Wikipedia

is reading The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard for Thursday, October 24, 2013.

Shirley Hazzard, a two-time winner of the National Book Award for fiction for The Transit of Venus published in 1980 and then again for her next book, The Great Fire published twenty-three years later.

The Great Fire is a story about love and war set against the backdrop of post-World War II Japan. The title refers both to wartime destruction and to the fires of love. The main character, thirty-two year-old Aldred Leith is a military hero and the son of a famous British writer. He arrives in Japan in 1947 to write about the “consequences of war within an ancient and vanishing society,” and the effects of the bombing Hiroshima. He falls in love with a “not quite eighteen” year-old Australian girl, Helen, whose overbearing father is his commanding officer. Ignored by their parents, Helen and her terminally ill brother Benedict form an affectionate bond with Leith. Through a shared love of literature, this bond moves from friendship to love.

Hazzard takes us across the globe on the impossible and inevitable journey of the love affair between Aldred and Helen through readings, conversations and letters. The beauty of their correspondences can be seen in the following passage of a letter from Helen to Aldred: "Dear Aldred, 
When you were at Harbin, we looked at Harbin on the map; at Shanhaikwan, the same. When you get to Kwangehowwan, think of us with the atlas open. Still- 
      
Maps are of place, not time, nor can they say
The surprising height and colour of a building 
Nor where the groups of people bar the way.

These lines are about Verona, where we went with Bertam and where I put the rose on Juliet’s tomb. Sad Newman, in the Strait of Bonifacio, smuggled a line from Romeo and Julier into his hymn. Did you realize?"

Later when Leith is alone, "he drew the letters from his pocket and lay down on the sofa and reread them...You will come back. When you come. It was years since anyone had longed for his return." 

Hazzard brings love and war together through the gift of words. 

Shirley Hazzard and Richard Ford at Pen America.