The Transit of Venus, Shirley Hazzard

The Transit of Venus is considered Shirley Hazzard's most brilliant novel. It tells the story of two orphan sisters, Caroline and Grace Bell, as they leave Australia to start a new life in post-war England. What happens to these young women -- seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal -- becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves.

Gorgeously written and intricately constructed, Hazzard's novel is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the eighties; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life.