One title on the list:Transit of VenusRead about another book on the list.
by Shirley Hazzard
Viking, 1980
"You could see the two sisters had passed through some unequivocal experience, which, though it might not interest others, had formed and indissolubly bound them." The experience that binds Caroline and Grace Bell in this wise and elegant novel is to have been orphaned at an early age and raised in the grim suburbs of Sydney by their resentment-crabbed step-sister, Dora. As young women, they flee their suffocating life on the colonial fringes, for England, where their sentimental educations begin in earnest. The account of their respective journeys through romance, marriage and betrayal is part love story, part mystery, part engrossing novel of ideas. Shirley Hazzard is one of the rare writers whose work is equally satisfying at both a micro and a macro level—which is to say, her sentences are as finely wrought and as carefully plotted as her larger story.
Transit of Venus is one of Jennifer Egan's five most important books.
--Marshal Zeringue
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