Where to start with Shirley Hazzard

Australian and American novelist, 1931–2016. Won the National Book Award for Fiction in 2003.

Best Shirley Hazzard book to start with: The Great Fire (2003), on 2 of the 19 lists it could have made.

The Great Fire, her last novel, is the place to start. It won the National Book Award in 2003 and was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2004. It is set in Japan and Hong Kong in the years just after the Second World War and follows a decorated British officer and the people he meets there. It is her most direct book, and the sentences do a great deal of the work.

The Bay of Noon was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1970 and the National Book Award in 1971. It is set in Naples in the 1950s and is shorter than the others, so it is a good place to try her if you want a smaller book first. The Transit of Venus is the largest of the three: two Australian sisters are followed through decades in England and elsewhere. Read it third, once you know her way of leaving things unsaid.