The Great Fire

The Great Fire is a novel by Shirley Hazzard set in 1947, in the unsettled years just after the Second World War. Aldred Leith, an acclaimed war hero in his thirties, has spent two years traveling through China to write about the changes sweeping the country. He arrives in occupied Japan to study the effects of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and there he meets Helen Driscoll, a young Australian woman caring for her brother Benedict, who is dying of a rare illness. As a quiet love grows between Leith and Helen, his old friend Peter Exley, an art historian, works on the prosecution of Japanese war crimes. Moving between Asia and Europe, the novel follows people still young but marked by war as they try to rebuild their lives and recover their capacity for tenderness. It won the 2003 National Book Award for Fiction.