The Transit of Venus

Caroline and Grace Bell, two beautiful orphan sisters eager to begin their lives in a new land, journey to England from Australia. What happens to these young women - seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal - becomes as moving and wonderful and yet as predestined as the transits of the planets themselves. The Transit of Venus is a story of place: Sydney, London, New York, Stockholm; of time: from the fifties to the eighties; and above all, of women and men in their passage through the displacements and absurdities of modern life.