Hazzard very gradually layers in revealing details of Aldred’s family background (as the basically unloved son of a successful romance novelist), complicated sexual and marital history, and increasingly disillusioning military experiences. Housed with the family of an intemperate Brigadier, Aldred finds himself drawn to the latter’s adolescent children: beautiful, reserved Helen, and her almost ethereal brother Benedict, who is wasting away from a pernicious paralytic disease. The story opens in 1947 when Major Aldred Leith, a 32-year-old combat veteran and prison camp survivor, travels to a military compound on an island in Japan’s Inland Sea, preparatory to a “tour” of Hiroshima, one of several sites he’s compelled to write about, and understand. Hazzard painstakingly constructs a compact panorama of a world ravaged by war, in her expert fourth novel-and first since the NBCC Award winner, The Transit of Venus (1980).
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