Shirley Hazzard's fiction is known and admired for its complexly bourgeois pleasures and interests, its internal personal and symbolic dynamics and complexities. However, also important to Hazzard are what she calls, according to Peter Fuller (The Canberra Times, 31 May 1992), "public themes," most evident in her nonfiction, but also resonating through her novels and stories. In addition to her ongoing critique of the United Nations (UN), her work canvasses a range of aesthetic issues and an abiding commitment to humanist values and the perceived need for writers and artists to ensure the retention of these beliefs in the modern world. The fiction, drawing on her own vast familiarity with European culture, poetry in particular, is thus demanding of its readers: as John Colmer has noted, "Shirley Hazzard writes for an audience sensitive to the slightest nuances of speech and alert to every literary allusion." The writing is also noted...