The Transit of Venus.

HAZZARD, Shirley.

Item Number: 137659

New York: The Viking Press, 1980.

First edition of “one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century” (The Paris Review). Octavo, original half cloth. Presentation copy, inscribed by the author on the half-title page. Fine in a fine dust jacket. 

"The Transit of Venus is one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century. It's difficult to make such a straight, simple claim without wanting to modify or amplify it, but it is. It is greater than any novel by Don DeLillo. It is greater than any work by Alice Munro or Thomas Pynchon. No disrespect to those three indisputable geniuses, or to anyone else whose books have been tagged, however deservedly, with the word masterpiece, but I'm hard-pressed to think of a better novel than Shirley's" (The Paris Review). "It 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).