The Transit of Venus

Shirley Hazzard's writing style really floored me. It is playful, wry, elegant, concise and full of emotions. Each sentence seems to be carefully constructed, each sentence could be THE artful sentence in another book. And put together, they are not intellectual and highbrow as one might expect, but hold this strange magic and a timeless quality. It takes a bit to get into, and one has to slow down, but it's so rewarding, cherishing those lines.

My favourite thing might have been her unfinished sentences. Sentences where everyone already knows where the plot is going, so she just drops them mid sentence. She doesn't do it often enough to become repetitive, just so perfectly sporadic that every time I stumbled over one, I was delighted by the cleverness.

I'll say the writing tops the plot, even though I enjoyed my time with Caroline and Grace, their entertaining aunt Dora (who's self-pity could come straight from a Jane Austen novel), and the men around them.