Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly
Hart's tragic and emotional tour de force, which spent 16 weeks on PW 's hardcover bestseller list, is narrated by a man obsessed with his son's fiancee. This Literary Guild selection has 90,000 hardcover copies in print. (Mar.)
Library Journal
The unnamed narrator of this chilling, uncomfortable first novel lives a life many men work vainly all their lives to attain: wealth, successful political career, beautiful wife, two attractive children. At the age of 50, however, the narrator has yet to feel passionately about anything--or anyone--in his life. Then his son brings home the woman he plans to marry, the enigmatic Anna Barton, and he recognizes in Anna the passion for which he will eagerly lay to waste everything and everyone in his life. Anna, tragedy ever-present in her life, warns, ``Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive.'' Unheeding, he does not veer from a path which can lead only to damage for everyone except, ultimately, perhaps Anna herself. Compulsively readable enough to be devoured in a single sitting, this novel is brilliant, but unsettling. Obsession and its aftermath can be fascinating, but never comfortable, reading. For large fiction collections. Literary Guild alternate; previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 11/15/90.--Dean James, Houston Acad. of Medicine/Texas Medical Ctr. Lib.
From the Publisher
To read this tale of mutual obsession is like being abducted. Josephine Hart has managed to create a portrait of psychological and erotic obsession that is so compelling as, for a brief moment, to suck all the oxygen out of the air.” —Los Angeles Times
“A taut, sinister tale of erotic obsession.” —Vanity Fair
“Damage is a masterpiece.” —The Washington Post
“The violent dreamscape of Damage stayed with me long after I closed the book. Did I dream it? Did I live it? My very uncertainty tells me I have read something rare.” —Erica Jong, author of Fear of Flying “A passionate, elegant, ruthless story.” —Iris Murdoch
“The effect is powerful: here is naked obsession, sulphurous, total, scarcely possible to live with.” —Financial Times
