A literary masterpiece, the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves.

Narrated by Juliet Stevenson and featuring archival audio of Shirley Hazzard reading from the stage of the 92NYC.

 

  • “Juliet Stevenson’s voice in this production is like a spa tub, soothing and stimulating at the same time. Stevenson embodies all the major characters through voices and accents, and develops their emotions and growth with great empathy. Most of the action is internal to the characters, and in this performance it is absolutely riveting.”—Audiofile

    “The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century.”—The Paris Review

    “An almost perfect novel . . . Hazzard writes as well as Stendhal.”—The New York Times

    “The new edition is a treat for new fans.”—The New Republic

    “The Transit of Venus is complex and luminous, like tapestries of mythological scenes, the craftsmanship admirable with no strand lost or insignificant, the details deliciously precise and the scope panoramic.”—Chicago Tribune Book World

    “Hazzard is a worldly writer with a sense of humor; at one twist of her skewer, the trendy and the shoddy are impaled. The Transit of Venus is an old-fashioned novel of plainest elegance."—Harper’s

    “Nothing gave me as much happiness as Shirley Hazzard’s The Transit of Venus. Hazzard’s prose is magic on the page, somehow at once surgical and symphonic. . . . All the sentences are . . . small masterpieces that amount to a large one. Read it now, so you can read it again soon.” —Tad Friend, The New Yorker

    “In The Transit of Venus, [Hazzard] brings a clarity and steeliness reminiscent of classical tragedy to her material—an extraordinary achievement. The sense of fatality and patterning in this flawlessly constructed novel is strong.”—The Independent

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

  • “An almost perfect novel” (The New York Times), The Transit of Venus follows Caroline and Grace Bell as they leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. From Sydney to London, New York, and Stockholm, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two sisters experience seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal.

    Caro, gallant and adventurous, has been courted long and hopelessly by young scientist Ted Tice. The milder Grace seeks fulfillment in an apparently happy marriage. But as the decades pass and the characters weave in and out of each other’s lives, love, death, and two secrets wait in ambush for them.

    In exquisite prose, Shirley Hazzard tells the story of the displacements and absurdities of modern life. The result is at once an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a tantalizing love story that will transport listeners with “its plushness, patient description, [and] etherizing beauty” (Parul Sehgal, The New York Times).

    PRODUCT DETAILS

    ASIN: B0D9MTDCDV
    Price: $18.89
    On-sale date: 9/10/2024
    Running time: TK