Books: Elusive Echo

Elusive Echo

THE EVENING OF THE HOLIDAY by Shirley Hazzard. 152 pages. Knopf. $3.95.

If they are gifted, young writers suffer the indignity of being compared to somebody else. So it was with Australian-born Shirley Hazzard when a collection of her short stories was published in 1963. As evocative as but perhaps less crisp than the young Katherine Mansfield? An ear for dialogue that matches Elizabeth Bowen's but lacks her sure sense of social structure? And somehow falls short of Rosamond Lehmann?

In this near-perfect first novel, 32-year-old Author Hazzard proves that she writes like no one except herself. And she proves...

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