Damage: A Novel

by Josephine Hart

Overview

**Soon to be appearing on Netflix as "Obsession," starring Richard Armitage and Charlie Murphy**

This New York Times bestselling novel, now in a brand-new edition, is a daring look at the dangers of obsession and the depth of its shattering consequences.

Damage is the gripping story of a man’s desperate obsession and scandalous love affair. He is a man who appears to have everything: wealth, a beautiful wife and children, and a prestigious political career in Parliament. But his life lacks passion, and his aching emptiness drives him to an all-consuming, and ultimately catastrophic, relationship with his son’s fiancée. 

Chilling and brilliant, Damage is a New York Times bestselling masterpiece of the romantic suspense genre.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781639363094
Publisher:	Pegasus Books
Publication date:	01/10/2023
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	280,866
File size:	879 KB

About the Author

Josephine Hart, Baroness Saatchi, was an Irish writer, theatrical producer, and television presenter who lived in London. Lady Saatchi wrote the New York Times bestselling novel Damage, which was the basis for the 1992 film of the same name, directed by Louis Malle and starring Jeremy Irons, Juliette Binoche and Rupert Graves.

Editorial Reviews

"A remarkable first novel of awesome accomplishment and quite startling psychological insight. 'Un-put-downable' is here, for once, not hyperbolic."

Ruth Rendell

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 passionate, elegant, ruthless story.

Iris Murdoch

A taut, sinister tale of erotic obsession.

Vanity Fair

The effect is powerful: here is naked obsession, sulfurous, total, scarcely possible to live with.

Financial Times

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

The reader looks on with mingled shock and fascination. A tour de force.

The New York Times

The effect is powerful: here is naked obsession, sulfurous, total, scarcely possible to live with.

Financial Times

The reader looks on with mingled shock and fascination. A tour de force.

The New York Times

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

02/01/2023

Twenty years before E.L. James's Fifty Shades of Grey had readers all bewitched, bothered, and/or bewildered, a less salacious but equally passionate tale of sexual compulsion written by Josephine Hart, aka Baroness Saatchi (1942–2011) swept through the literary world like a fever, or at least a hot flash. The swift, taut drama of the successful middle-aged narrator's hopeless fascination with his son's fiancée Ann Barton, an enthrallingly damaged woman who seems equally in thrall (or is she?), is perhaps best consumed in a single sitting, the better to lose critical distance and submit to the novel's hypnotic pull toward a catastrophe with the terrible inevitability of classic noir, minus the tough stuff. VERDICT Next to the often-contrived twists and revelations of today's psychological suspense, Hart's spare tale of all-consuming obsession is refreshingly straightforward. Louis Malle directed a 1992 film adaptation of the same name; a limited series for Netflix is currently underway, so anticipate demand.

Library Journal