Travelling far without finding home

This unusual and nostalgic novel comes from a writer whose last work, The Transit of Venus, remains as startling and effective today as it did when it was published in 1980. The Transit of Venus was an open-ended love story whose development could only be pieced together from clues dropped unobtrusively in the text and which had to be assembled by the reader after some cogitation. Like Nabokov, Shirley Hazzard clearly believes that Fate has the best plots. The lovers, brought together at the close, are divided for ever by an accident barely signalled but as conclusive as death. Both had followed parallel paths but were distracted by other alliances, other displacements, which they were only able to overcome by virtue of that same fate that ultimately divided them. The shape was classical, the feeling utterly romantic. The Transit of Venus remains one of the most thoroughly successful novels of the last 20 years.