The Evening of the Holiday

by Shirley Hazzard

Overview

In the words of Time magazine, "A near perfect novel...a small masterpiece" by the author of The Great Fire

Passionate undercurrents sweep in and out of this eloquent novel about a love affair in a 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, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466801059
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	07/01/2004
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	144
Sales rank:	454,539
File size:	210 KB

About the Author

Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) is the author, most recently, of Greene on Capri, a memoir of Graham Greene, and several works of fiction, including The Evening of the Holiday, The Bay of Noon, and The Transit of Venus, winner of the 1981 National Book Critics Circle Award. She lived in New York City and Capri.

Shirley Hazzard (1931-2016) was born in Australia, and in early years traveled the world with her parents due to their diplomatic postings. At sixteen, living in Hong Kong, she was engaged by British Intelligence, where, in 1947-48, she was involved in monitoring the civil war in China. Thereafter, she lived in New Zealand and in Europe; in the United States, where she worked for the United Nations Secretariat in New York; and in Italy. In 1963, she married the writer Francis Steegmuller, who died in 1994.

Ms. Hazzard's novels are The Evening of the Holiday (1966), The Bay of Noon (1970), The Transit of Venus (1981) and The Great Fire (2003). She is also the author of two collections of short fiction, Cliffs of Fall and Other Stories (1963) and People in Glass Houses (1967). Her nonfiction works include Defeat of an Ideal (1973), Countenance of Truth (1990), and the memoir Greene on Capri (2000). She lived in New York, with sojourns in Italy.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

January 30, 1931

Place of Birth:

Sydney, Australia

Education:

Educated at Queenwood College, Sydney, Australia

Editorial Reviews

Charged with great power...The impact on the reader is extraordinarily intense.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Short, elegant, and very good...A beautifully precise, ironic and yet evocative style.” —The New York Review of Books

“An authentic work of art...A cause for delight and gratitude...Beautiful, absorbing, satisfying.” —Chicago Tribune

From the Publisher