The sweeping story of men and women struggling to reclaim their lives in the aftermath of world conflict by 'one of the greatest writers working in English today' (Michael Cunningham) and Winner of the National Book Award for Fiction.

Passionate undercurrents sweep in and out of this eloquent novel about a love affair in the summer countryside in Italy and its inevitable end. It takes place in a setting of pastoral beauty during a time of celebration -- a festival. Sophie, half English, half Italian, meets Tancredi, an Italian who is separated from his wife and family. In telling the story of their love affair, author Shirley Hazzard punctures the placid surface of polite Italian society to reveal the intense yearnings and surprising responses in sophisticated people caught up in emotions they do not always understand.

Adventurous Caro is one of two Australian sisters who have come to post-war England to seek their fortunes. Courted long and hopelessly by young scientist Ted, she is to find that love brings sorrow as well as passion whilst her sister, the milder Grace, seeks fulfillment in marriage.

For millennia the cliffs of Capri have sheltered pleasure-seekers and refugees alike, among them the emperors Augustus and Tiberius, Henry James, Rilke, Lenin, and hosts of artists, eccentrics, and outcasts. It was here in the 1960s that Graham Greene became friends with Shirley Hazzard and her husband, the writer Francis Steegmuller, and their friendship lasted until Greene's death in 1991. In this volume, Hazzard uses their ever-volatile intimacy as a prism through which to illuminate Greene's mercurial character, his work and talk, and the extraordinary literary culture that long thrived...