DAMAGE

by Josephine Hart ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 26, 1991

This spare, dreamlike first novel comes festooned with blurbs from the likes of Ruth Rendell and Iris Murdoch, and no wonder, for it's an unforgettable tale of sexual obsession and its calamitous consequences. Hart's nameless narrator is a blandly successful physician and M.P. whose well-ordered life ends the moment he first sees his son Martyn's new girlfriend Anna Barton. Besotted with love for Anna and awe of her mysterious power over him (is she his slave, as she insists, or is he hers?), he begins a frantic affair with her, deceiving his wife Ingrid, his daughter Sally, and Martyn himself, who announces his engagement to Anna the morning after one of his father's most desperate trysts with her in a spare room of Hartley, the estate of Ingrid's wealthy, proper father Edward. As Martyn's father sinks deeper into horror at his capacity for betrayal, he sees that Anna's estranged parents are equally blind to the affair; only her commanding stepfather, Wilbur Hunter, realizes the corrosive power of his love. But he's warned at every turn about the ways their affair echoes her earlier incestuous affair with her brother Aston, who killed himself when she became too close to another boy named Stephen, now grown to become the keeper of Anna's secrets and the unwitting agent of catastrophe as Anna reveals the true extent of her ruthlessness--and as the affair hurtles from reckless pleasure to tragedy to dull grief. Elliptical, haunting, and altogether extraordinary.

Pub Date: March 26, 1991

ISBN: 1453200088

Page Count: -

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1991

Categories: FICTION