The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard has been on my book shelf for quite a while and I was suddenly motivated to pare down my unread books, so I figured a good place to start was with this National Book Award winner.
The novel is set in Asia in the late 1940s, a culture and period I didn't know much about. One could assume that there was great devastation in Japan after the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but Hazzard assumes too much prior knowledge of the time and place she sets her story in.
Aldred Leith, an English man in Japan to survey the damage, is the main character who falls in love with a young teenage girl, Helen. The romance between Aldred and Helen is sweet and the loss of Helen's sickly brother Ben bittersweet. But it takes too long to get there and then when you do the resolution of the affair is anti-climatic
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