The Bay of Noon by Shirley Hazzard

Shirley Hazzard's absence from the literary stage for 20 years has not gone unnoticed. In 1981, the Australian novelist won the National Book Critics Circle Award for The Transit of Venus and promptly disappeared before resurfacing again in 2003 with The Great Fire, winner of The National Book Award. Today, we take a look back at her 1970 classic, The Bay of Noon, re-released in 2003 by Picador.

The Bay of Noon is about a friendship between two women; "Jenny, an English diplomatic assistant on assignment in post-WWII Italy. And Gioconda, the sole mistress of a decaying ancestral home rooted in the heart of Naples...

Read Laura Tyler's review of The Bay of Noon.