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The Transit of Venus
The richly evocative modern classic
Series: Virago Modern Classics
Brief Description
'One of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century' PARIS REVIEW'The Transit of Venus is astronomical: as sharp, remote and dazzling as a celestial body' LAUREN GROFF'A wonderfully mysterious book . . . unforgettably rich' ANNE TYLER'Epic and microscopic . . . stitched in prose...
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Format: Paperback / softback
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See moreThe award-winning literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard - the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves. Now reissued as a Virago Classic with Bite
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Description
'One of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century' PARIS REVIEW'The Transit of Venus is astronomical: as sharp, remote and dazzling as a celestial body' LAUREN GROFF'A wonderfully mysterious book . . . unforgettably rich' ANNE TYLER'Epic and microscopic . . . stitched in prose of gorgeously sustained intensity' GEOFF DYERThe tragedy is not that love doesn't last. The tragedy is the love that lasts.Two sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. Courted long and hopelessly by young scientist, Ted Tice, strong-willed Caro is to find that love brings both betrayal and hope. The milder Grace seeks fulfilment in an apparently happy marriage. But as the decades pass and their paths weave and cross across the world - from Sydney to London, New York to Stockholm - two slow-burning secrets wait in ambush for them. Shirley Hazzard's breathtaking masterpiece is an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a desperate love story.
Series: Virago Modern Classics
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Giving a party was not as simple as going to one. You could always leave someone else's party. You were stuck with your own. Dolls - red or black; capsules or tablets; washed down with vodka or swallowed straight. For Anne, Neely and Jennifer, it doesn't matter, as long as the pill bottle is within easy reach. These three starlets...Paperback$2799Unit price /UnavailableIn StockShips today -
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Book Details
INFORMATION
ISBN: 9780349020907
Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group
Format: Paperback / softback
Date Published: 22 January 2026
Country: United Kingdom
Imprint: Virago Press Ltd
Audience: General / adult
DIMENSIONS
Spine width: 26.0mm
Width: 126.0mm
Height: 196.0mm
Weight: 291g
Pages: 368
About the Author
Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was born in Australia and travelled the world during her early years, a result of her parents' diplomatic postings. In 1947, at the age of sixteen, she was engaged by British intelligence to monitor the civil war in China. At twenty, she moved to New York, working for the United Nations throughout much of the 1950s, which included a posting to Naples. Muriel Spark introduced her to the translator and biographer Francis Steegmuller, whom Hazzard married in 1963. Her novels The Bay of Noon (1971) and The Transit of Venus (1981) were National Book Award finalists, while her last novel, The Great Fire, won the 2003 National Book Award, Miles Franklin Award and was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction. She was also the author of two collections of short stories, and several works of nonfiction including the memoir Greene on Capri.
Also by Shirley Hazzard
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The Ancient Shore β Dispatches from Naples
Born in Australia, Shirley Hazzard first moved to Naples as a young woman in the 1950s to take up a job with the United Nations. It was the beginning of a long love affair with the city. The Ancient Shore collects the best of Hazzardβs writings on Naples, along with a classic New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis...Paperback$3099Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
Expatriates of No Country
For more than thirty years, the acclaimed novelist Shirley Hazzard and the renowned scholar of Japanese literature Donald Keene maintained a remarkable epistolary friendship. Brought together by the death of a mutual friend in the late 1970s, they discovered a profound connection built on mutual affinities for literature and culture and common values of humanism and cosmopolitanism. Expatriates of No...Paperback$4199Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 3-4 weeks -
We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think
Spanning the 1960s to the 2000s, these nonfiction writings showcase Shirley Hazzard's extensive thinking on global politics, international relations, the history and fraught present of Western literary culture, and postwar life in Europe and Asia. They add essential clarity to the themes that dominate her award-winning fiction and expand the intellectual registers in which her writings work. Hazzard writes about...Paperback$9100Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
The Great Fire
Shirley Hazzard's "brilliant and dazzling" (Ann Patchett) National Book Award-winning novel of love after war. Shirley Hazzard wrote of ravaged worlds that remained grandly romantic despite the forces of their time. The Great Fire, her final novel, which won the National Book Award, surveys the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, when veterans of devastation, still in their youth,...Paperback$5400Unit price /UnavailableAvailableShips in 2-3 weeks -
The Bay Of Noon
The scene is Naples, against whose ancient and fantastic background the modern action takes place. Among the protagonists is Jenny, young and pretty, who has come to Naples in flight from a sombre drama, unaware that a larger drama awaits her there. She has an introduction to a Neapolitan woman, and one day she idly follows it up. This is...PaperbackSold Out -
The Collected Stories of Shirley Hazzard
Collected Stories includes both volumes of National Book Award-winning author Shirley Hazzard's short story collections - Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses - alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories. Twenty-eight works of short fiction in all, Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and talent. Taken together, Hazzard's short stories are masterworks in...PaperbackSold Out -
The Great Fire
The Great Fire is Shirley Hazzard's first novel since The Transit of Venus, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1981. The conflagration of her title is the Second World War. In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past,...PaperbackSold Out -
Greene On Capri
For millennia, the cliffs of Capri have sheltered pleasure-seekers and refugees alike, among them the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, Henry James, Rilke, Lenin, and hosts of artists, eccentrics, and outcasts. It was here in the 1960s that Graham Greene became friends with Shirley Hazzard and her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller, and their friendship lasted until Greene's death in 1991....PaperbackSold Out -
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The Transit of Venus tells the story of Caro, gallant and adventurous, who is one of two Australian sisters that have come to post-war England to seek their fortunes. Courted long and hopelessly by young scientist Ted Tice, Caro finds that love brings passion, sorrow, betrayal, and finally hope. The milder Grace seeks fulfilment in an apparently happy marriage. Yet,...PaperbackSold Out -
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The Collected Stories includes both volumes of National Book Award-winning author Shirley Hazzard's short story collections β Cliffs of Fall and People in Glass Houses β alongside uncollected works and two previously unpublished stories. With twenty-eight works of short fiction in all, Shirley Hazzard's Collected Stories is a work of staggering breadth and talent. Taken together, Hazzard's short stories are...PaperbackSold Out
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