Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard

Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard. 1980 Viking, first edition, signed by author, 337 pages. Hazzard was an Australian-American author and essayist best known for her novels Transit of Venus and the Great Fire. According to the NYT on a reissue of Transit: "The pleasure this writing affords — its plushness, patient description, etherizing beauty — does not stem from its closeness to life, however. The pleasure Hazzard wants to convey is novelistic and bound up in the act and fact of reading. " Condition: Jacket in good-, wear and chipping, book good+, some fading, browning from a newspaper article tucked in the back endpaper "By nightfall the headlines would be reporting devastation."