Robert Louis Stevenson so many irons in the fire". He wrote "The Beach of Falesa", "Catriona" (titled "David Balfour" in the US), "The Ebb-Tide", and the "Vailima Letters" during this period. Stevenson grew depressed and wondered if he had exhausted his creative vein, as he had been "overworked bitterly" and that the best he could write was "ditch-water". He even feared that he might again become a helpless invalid. He rebelled against this idea: "I wish to die in my boots; no more Land of Counterpane for me. To be drowned, to be shot, to be thrown from a horse — ay, to
The Great Fire (novel) friend of Leith's who is investigating Japanese war crimes, and Helen Driscoll, an Australian teenager with whom Leith falls in love while billeted in Japan. "The New Yorker" wrote of the novel: Hazzard is nothing if not discriminating. Hierarchies of feeling, perception, and taste abound in her writing, and this novel—her first in more than twenty years—takes on the very notion of what it means to be civilized. The fire of the title refers primarily to the atomic bombing of Japan, but also to the possibility of transcendent passion in its aftermath. In 1947, a thirty-two-year-old English war hero visiting