The silence after war

But their son and daughter infuse his life with oxygen. Like Leith, Ben and Helen have suffered and benefited from isolation. Shipped around the world to avoid running into war or burdening their parents, these two siblings sound like characters written by Louisa May Alcott, the effect of having no company but each other and a collection of 19th-century novels.

Cloistered in their rooms with this dashing and modest war hero during hot afternoons, Ben and Helen feel as though they've discovered another fascinating narrator. Charming, openly affectionate, and searingly perceptive, they're just the sort of people Leith needs to nurse him back into the habits of affection.

However, two problems threaten this oasis in the ruins of war: First, Ben is rapidly declining under the effects of a chronic illness, which his parents alternately ignore and resent. Second, Leith feels he mustn't pursue his love for Helen because, at 17, she's almost half his age. And yet, as Ben's health fails and Leith's desire grows, the three of them conspire against death and parents to devise some way to stay together. "Having expected, repeatedly to die from the great fires into which this time had pitched him," Hazzard writes, "Leith had recovered a great desire to live completely; by which he meant, with her."

Several stories develop alongside this one, involving Leith's friends and relations, all uncertain about how to reconstruct a life in the silence of peace. His best friend pursues war criminals in Hong Kong, but can't stand up to his parents. Back home in Britain, Leith meets an old lover who later became his father's mistress, a woman now suspended alone between her scruples and her shamelessness.

Hazzard writes with an extraordinary command of geography and time, moving around the world to gather fleeting but arresting impressions of fascism in Italy, battle in Germany, and defeat in Japan - all the shattering chaos that through a million permutations has brought Leith into the company of these two ethereal siblings.

Flashes of violence cut through the contemplative narrative, but in her exquisitely cut sentences, Hazzard concentrates on the subtler movements of these hearts cauterized by violence. Her story is eerily quiet, filled with despair but also traces of hope, caught indirectly, as astronomers locate dark matter by the way it bends light.

In a novel that would collapse under the weight of pretension if a line were mislaid, Hazzard keeps this romance aloft by virtue of her refined sentiment and an illuminating understanding of human nature. Against the backdrop of a world stunned by the most appalling obscenities, the affection between Leith and Helen glows with a kind of unearthly luminescence.

• Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor. Send e-mail comments about the book section toRon Charles.

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