The Transit of Venus

given their names in the village-the names, not of masters but of dwellings. Brick walls were threadbare, tawny; one showed a side of ivy, green as an upturned lawn. The farthest and largest house stood forward from a wood, claiming supremacy.



The man observed from a decisive turn of his own stillness, as if on some great clock he saw the hand fall to the next stroke before his eyes. He turned off the road on the first wave of rain and gale, put his suitcase down, took off his soaked cap, beat it on his side, and stuffed it in a pocket. His hair sprang up like the crops between the gusts and, like them, was quickly, wetly flat. He climbed the hill in the rain, steadily and with no air of wretchedness. Once he paused to look back at the valley-or vale, it might be sweetly, tamely called. Peal on peal of thunder swept it, up and down, until the pliant crops themselves reverberated. On an opposing hill there was a castle-grey, tumid, turreted, and not unsuited to the storm.



Approaching the farthest house, he paused again, looking with as much plain interest as if the weather had been fine. Water ran in his collar from his tilted head. The house darkened, but stood firm. Through two or three centuries of minor additions, Peverel had held to scale and congruity like a principle; consistent except for one enlarged high window-an intentional, frivolous defect like the piercing of an ear for an ornament.



Mud was streaming over gravel and beaten clay. Ledges of clipped privet were shaking all over. The man waded up into the entrance of the house as if from the sea, and pulled a bell. Quick footsteps were perhaps his own heartbeats. The woman who opened the door was old, he thought. Had he himself been a few years older, he might have promoted her to middle age. Age was coiled in smooth grey hair, was explicit in skin too delicate for youth and in a tall if unmartial stance. She drew him in over the paving of what had been a fine hall. Her eyes were enlarged and faded wi

without flaw. Aphoristic and iridescent, her language turns paragraphs into events."
The Washington Post Book World

"An impressive, mature novel, full and satisfying . . . The richest fictional repast I have had in a long time."
Doris Grumbach, Los Angeles Times

"The Transit of Venus is astronomical: as sharp, remote and dazzling as a celestial body. To read Shirley Hazzard's masterpiece for the first time is to be immediately submerged into a world in which language and character carry the reader along, gasping, in a current too strong to fight. To read the novel for the second, third, even the nth time, is to see Hazzard's careful orchestrations of echo and rhythm, her quiet deployment of foreshadowing and omniscient irony, and to be astonished anew . This is a book like George Eliot's Middlemarch, Virginia Woolf's To The Lighthouse, Penelope Fitzgerald's The Blue Flower that I have revisited every year since I first discovered it in my early twenties, when I devoted my best self to writing fiction. Even after so many reads, this novel fills me with equal parts disquiet and awe."
Lauren Groff, from the introduction