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

The Transit of Venus (King Penguin)

HAZZARD, SHIRLEY

Playboy

Shirley Hazzard's stories are portrayals of moments of crisis. Whether they are set in the Italian countryside or suburban Connecticut, the stories deal with real people and real problems.

Cliffs of Fall: And Other Stories (A King Penguin)

Literature & Fiction

Literary

Penguin??Books

A young English girl is introduced to the social life of Naples where she finds intrigue as well as glamour

The Bay of Noon (King Penguin)

During the Feast of the Ascension, a young English girl visiting Italy meets, allows herself to be seduced by, and falls in love with a middleaged architect separated from his wife

The Evening of the Holiday (A King Penguin)

The development of personal relationships and the conflicts between man and the impersonal corporate structure are examined in portraits of people working for the Organization, an international enterprise dedicated to fostering peace and serving humanity

People in Glass Houses

Penguin / King Penguin

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.

The Transit of Venus

United States

Product Description 
The award-winning, New York Times bestselling 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\nA Penguin Classic\nConsidered "one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century" ( 
The Paris Review), 
The Transit of Venus follows Caroline and Grace Bell as they leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. From Sydney to London, New York, and Stockholm, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two sisters experience seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal.\nWith exquisite, breathtaking prose, Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard tells the story of the displacements and absurdities of modern life. The result is at once an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a desperate love story. 
 Review 
" 
The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century. It's difficult to make such a straight, simple claim without wanting to modify or amplify it, but it is. It is greater than any novel by Don DeLillo. It is greater than any work by Alice Munro or Thomas Pynchon. No disrespect to those three indisputable geniuses, or to anyone else whose books have been tagged, however deservedly, with the word masterpiece, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a better novel than Shirley's." 
— 
The Paris Review\n"An almost perfect novel . . . Hazzard writes as well as Stendhal." 
— 
The New York Times“The new edition is a treat for new fans… Hazzard has never had a big reputation as a political writer, but her anti-authoritarian, anti-imperial, and generally anti-bureaucratic politics hold a special appeal in our own apocalyptic times.” 
— 
The New Republic\n" 
The Transit of Venus is complex and luminous, like tapestries of mythological scenes, the craftsmanship admirable with no strand lost or insignificant, the details deliciously precise and the scope panoramic." 
— 
Chicago Tribune Book World"Shirley Hazzard is a worldly writer with a sense of humor; at one twist of her skewer, the trendy and the shoddy are impaled. 
The Transit of Venus is an old-fashioned novel of plainest elegance." 
— 
Harper's Magazine"Nothing gave me as much happiness as Shirley Hazzard's 
The Transit of Venus. Hazzard's prose is magic on the page, somehow at once surgical and symphonic . . . All the sentences are . . . small masterpieces that amount to a large one. Read it now, so you can read it again soon." 
—Tad Friend, 
The New Yorker"In 
The Transit of Venus, [Hazzard] brings a clarity and steeliness reminiscent of classical tragedy to her material—an extraordinary achievement. The sense of fatality and patterning in this flawlessly constructed novel is strong." 
 —The Independent"A luminous novel . . . almost without flaw. Aphoristic and iridescent, her language turns paragraphs into events." 
— 
The Washington Post Book World"An impressive, mature novel, full and satisfying . . . The richest fictional repast I have had in a long time." 
—Doris Grumbach, 
Los Angeles Times" 
The Transit of Venus is astronomical: as sharp, remote and dazzling as a celestial body. To read Shirley Hazzard's masterpiece for the first time is to be immediately submerged into a world in which language and character carry the reader along, gasping, in a current too strong to fight. To read the novel for the second, third, even the nth time, is to see Hazzard's careful orchestrations of echo and rhythm, her quiet deployment of foreshadowing and omniscient irony, and to be astonished anew . This is a book—like George Eliot's 
Middlemarch, Virginia Woolf's 
To The Lighthouse, Penelope Fitzgerald's 
The Blue Flower—that I have revisited every year since I first discovered it in my early twenties, when I devoted my best self to writing fiction. Even after so many reads, this novel fills me with equal parts disquiet and awe." 
—Lauren

Penguin Classics

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 Hazzard’s writings on Naples, along with a classic New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in the present.
With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and of course Goethe, but Hazzard’s concern is primarily with the Naples of our own time—often violently unforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor who attends patiently to its rhythms and history. A town shadowed by both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to acknowledge the essential precariousness of life—nor, as the lover of Naples discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and friendship that are necessary to sustain it.
Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, The Ancient Shore is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted.
“Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to a place, and a time, where ‘nothing was pristine, except the light.’”—Bookforum
“Deep in the spell of Italy, Hazzard parses the difference between visiting and living and working in a foreign country. She writes with enormous eloquence and passion of the beauty of getting lost in a place.”—Susan Slater Reynolds, Los Angeles Times
“The two voices join in exquisite harmony. . . . A lovely book.”—Booklist, starred review

The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples

STEEGMULLER, Francis

History & Criticism

University of Chicago Press

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 Hazzard’s writings on Naples, along with a classic New Yorker essay by her late husband, Francis Steegmuller. For the pair, both insatiable readers, the Naples of Pliny, Gibbon, and Auden is constantly alive to them in the present. With Hazzard as our guide, we encounter Henry James, Oscar Wilde, and of course Goethe, but Hazzard’s concern is primarily with the Naples of our own time—often violently unforgiving to innocent tourists, but able to transport the visitor who attends patiently to its rhythms and history. A town shadowed by both the symbol and the reality of Vesuvius can never fail to acknowledge the essential precariousness of life—nor, as the lover of Naples discovers, the human compassion, generosity, and friendship that are necessary to sustain it. Beautifully illustrated by photographs from such masters as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Herbert List, The Ancient Shore is a lyrical letter to a lifelong love: honest and clear-eyed, yet still fervently, endlessly enchanted. “Much larger than all its parts, this book does full justice to a place, and a time, where ‘nothing was pristine, except the light.’”—Bookforum “Deep in the spell of Italy, Hazzard parses the difference between visiting and living and working in a foreign country. She writes with enormous eloquence and passion of the beauty of getting lost in a place.”—Susan Slater Reynolds, Los Angeles Times “The two voices join in exquisite harmony. . . . A lovely book.”—Booklist, starred review

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 her employment at the United Nations and the institution's manifold failings. She shares her personal experience with the aftermath of the Hiroshima atomic bombing and the nature of life in late-1940s Hong Kong. She speaks to the decline of the hero as a public figure in Western literature and affirms the ongoing power of fiction to console, inspire, and direct human life, despite―or maybe because of―the world's disheartening realities. Cementing Hazzard's place as one of the twentieth century's sharpest and most versatile thinkers, this collection also encapsulates for readers the critical events defining postwar letters, thought, and politics.

We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Columbia University Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HAZZARD, SHIRLEY. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by HAZZARD, SHIRLEY

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by HAZZARD, SHIRLEY. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Transit of Venus (King Penguin)

Cliffs of Fall: And Other Stories (A King Penguin)

The Bay of Noon (King Penguin)

The Evening of the Holiday (A King Penguin)

People in Glass Houses

The Transit of Venus

The Transit of Venus

The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples

The Ancient Shore: Dispatches from Naples

We Need Silence to Find Out What We Think: Selected Essays