A war hero's love in occupied Asia
Aldred Leith, a decorated British soldier, surveys the aftermath of war across Asia in 1947. He falls in love with a much younger woman amid the ruins.
The Great Fire
4 ideas
Aftermath of war and moral exhaustion
Set just after the Second World War, the novel examines survivors rebuilding meaning. Physical devastation is mirrored by moral fatigue.
Love as restoration after devastation
Intimacy becomes the counterforce to the era's destruction. The connection is tentative, hard-won and quietly redemptive.
Elegiac prose of witness
Hazzard renders history's convulsions through refined, interior narration. The style is attentive to the human cost of great events.