Reading Groups

The Summer of Shirley Hazzard with Sheridan Hay

6 Sessions Sundays, 1:00 pm EDT - 2:30 pm EDT July 27 to August 31, 2025

Online via Zoom

featured-images.reading-groups.202505069

The ‘With Books’ option includes the titles required for this group at an additional 10% discount from our Bookstore.

Meeting Dates:
7/27, 8/3, 8/10, 8/17, 8/24, 8/31
Online via Zoom

As the leader of the Henry James reading group at The Center for Fiction for ten years or so, and as an Australian writer, it perhaps won’t surprise any close reader that I’ve considered Shirley Hazzard to be one of my favorite authors since the 1980 publication of The Transit of Venus. This summer, spend six Sunday afternoons with me reveling in the immaculate prose and intellectual insight of this great novelist.

The plot of The Transit of Venus is simply described: two beautiful sisters leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England after the tragic death of their parents. The themes of innocence and betrayal, of power and corruption, and of falling (or not falling) for the appropriate person, are positively Jamesian. In the hands of Shirley Hazzard, however, the intricacies of love, of tragedy, and of colonial displacement, are inexorably played out in prose that astonishes with its clarity and crisp perfection. The novel is a modern classic for all sorts of reasons. In her introduction to this edition, Lauren Groff called the novel “astronomical … sharp, remote and dazzling.” novel. It is a revelation.

Hazzard’s The Great Fire was published to great acclaim, winning the National Book Award in 2003. It feels like a novel out of time—not because it also touches on Hiroshima and the devastations of World War II, or because it is set in occupied Japan and thus seems removed from our present historical moment (it doesn’t). As one reviewer wrote, “The Great Fire feels as if it comes to us from another time, really, other times—because Hazzard combines emotion on a scale we associate with 19th century novels, with language that has the freedom and lucid precision of early 20th century modernism.”

Explicitly anachronistic, the novel follows a hero of the war who arrives in Japan to record the effects of Hiroshima. There he meets the precocious and intelligent Australian siblings Helen and Benedict Driscoll, who have been “delivered by literature” from a different kind of war, one within their family. The “great fire” of the title is not only one of war and its conflagrations, but also refers to love and its power to transform, to persist, across “the distances that he, and she, must travel.” The novel is grandly, bravely, a tale of romantic love, but one that comes face to face with war’s implacable damage, with the transformations wrought by both great fires.

We will discuss both novels over six consecutive sessions (approximately one hundred pages each week).

What to read in advance of the first meeting: Please read part one of The Transit of Venus, “The Old World,” from pages 3-119.

What to expect from this reading group: Each 90-minute meeting will involve an opening set of remarks by Sheridan, followed by a facilitated discussion among the participants. Detailed notes will be emailed after each meeting.

Reading List:

The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
The Great Fire by Shirley Hazzard

Please note: All virtual classes are recorded. Please click here for information about our recording policy.

Led by

Sheridan Hay

Sheridan Hay

Sheridan Hay is a writer, editor, and teacher. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars. Her first novel, The Secret of Lost Things (Doubleday/Anchor), was a Booksense Pick, a Barnes and Noble Discover selection, shortlisted for the Border’s Original Voices Fiction Prize, and nominated for the International Impact Award. A San Francisco Chronicle bestseller and a New York Times Editor’s Choice, it was published in fourteen countries. Sheridan has led The Center for Fiction’s popular Moby-Dick reading group many times, as well as leading a long-standing Henry James group, among others. Early in her career, Sheridan was an editor at Simon & Schuster and worked at HarperCollins and Penguin Books in New York and in Sydney, Australia where she was born. She is a partner in the literary development and management collaboration, Filmore Projects (www.filmoreprojects.com)

About this series

Reading Groups

Whether you’re looking to catch up on great novels or you’re interested in exploring a new writer or literary period, our reading groups offer high-level literary discussion led by experts in the field.

Groups+Workshops

More Groups+Workshops

Groups+Workshops