The Great Fire

The year is 1947. The great fire of the Second World War has convulsed Europe and Asia. In its wake, Aldred leith, an acclaimed hero of the conflict, has spent two years in China at work on an account of world-transforming change there. Son of a famed and sexually ruthless novelist, Leith begins to resist his own self-sufficiency, nutured by the war. Peter Exley, another veteran and an art historian by training, is prosecuting war crimes committed by the Japanese. Both men have narrowly escaped death in battle, and Leith saved Exley’s life. The man have maintained long-distance friendship in a postwar loneliness that haunts them both, and which has swallowed Exley whole. now in their thirties, with their youth behind them and their world in ruins, both must invent the future and retrieve a private humanity. Arriving in occupied Japan to record the effects of the bomb at Hiroshima, Leth meets Benedict and Helen Criscoll, the Australian son and daughter of a tyrranical medical administrator. Benedict, at twenty, is doomed by a rare degenerative disease. Helen, still younger, is inseperable from her brother. Precocious, brilliant, sensitive, at home in the books they read together, these two have been, in Leith’s words, delivered by literature. The young people capture Leith’s sympathy; indeed, he finds himself struggling with his attraction to this girl whose feelings are as intense as his own and from whom he will soon be fatefully parted. A deeply observed story of love and seperation, of disillusion and recovered humanity, The Great Fire marks the much-awaited return of an author whose novel The Transit of Venus won the National Book Critics Circle Award and, twenty years after itspublication, is considered a modern classic.