The Evening of the Holiday by Shirley Hazzard

 With Transit of Venus, The Bay of Noon, and The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard has written some of the great novels of our time. Everyone has to start somewhere, though. The Evening of the Holiday, Hazzard's first novel, is where she started. It is, as is partly true of all her books, a love story. In this case a half-Italian half-English woman becomes involved with an Italian in Italy. As always, Hazzard writes about the affair meticulously. No sentence is less than perfect, but the book, as short as it is, was but if a slog. It didn't, for me, come to life until the last page or two. It is there that we see the writer Hazzard was to become.

The affair, as both parties knew it would have to, has come to an end. The protagonist is on a train, the first leg of her trip back to England. There are soldiers on the train, among them a bugler who tries to play whenever the train stops:

 The wistful music filled the train and floated out on the cold dark station of every town we stopped at. The song never reached its conclusion, for the train would always start up again with the last refrain and the instrument would be violently shaken in the musician's mouth and grasp. But after each such departure, for a little while, the bugler tried to keep playing, to reach the end of the song; and these last notes, wobbling and swaying, persisted out of the the station and into the countryside until the train, gathering speed, made it impossible to play any longer. 

We see here the writer that Hazzard we will come to love. We can't wait to read more.