The Transit of Venus [Paperback]

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

The Transit of Venusis 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.“The Transit of Venusis 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 wordexquisite.. . . 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)
Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard traveled the world during her early years, a result of her parents' diplomatic postings. In 1947, at the age of 16, she was engaged by British intelligence to monitor the civil war in China. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994. She has written several novels, two of which were National Book Award Finalists:The Bay of Noon(1971) andThe Transit of Venus(1981, available from Penguin). She is also the author of two colleclsÇ