A fifty-year-old man, a successful doctor and member of parliament, seems to have all that could be wanted in life: wealth, power, respect, a beautiful wife and daughter, and a handsome son. But for the unnamed narrator of Josephine Hart’s Damage, this life, despite its successes, fails to fulfill him. It has become a role he has accepted and learned to play well because he has yet to either understand or admit to himself his real desires. All this changes on the day he meets his son’s lover, Anna, and obsession wakes within him:

'The shock of recognition had passed through my body like a powerful current. Just for a moment I had met my sort, another of my species' (p.30).

For the narrator Anna embodies a mixture of sexual freedom and a capacity for bearing pain that he at last recognizes within himself. And the two begin an affair, regardless of the consequences or, perhaps better said, precisely because living with the threat of those consequences excites them.

Damage is ultimately a novel about obsessive love as possession: the lover’s need not to possess but to be possessed by its object of love. Anna, if the lover can be believed, sparks life into the narrator for the first time, and even through family tragedy and separation he continues to carry a piece of her within him. But what could have been an intimate examination of physical desire in the face of an otherwise conservative life, the novel, because of its overwrought prose and its, ultimately, passive characters, becomes an exercise in melodrama. Where the narrative remains restrained and conservative is where Hart is at her best in writing, but where the narrative stretches to an emotional pitch it fails. ( )

This is the most poorly written book I've read in a long time. How this book can be recommended by Iris Murdoch and Ted Hughes is beyond me. Could this be vanity published? The writer I see is married to a Saatchi and, after all, money talks. A cornucopia of boring sentences, cardboard characters and a slow, cliched plot. Dire. ( )

excellent story about obsession and betrayal. movie nowhere near as good.

I am always wary of telling people that this is one of my favourite books due to the nature of its story - a man who falls in lust with his son's fiancee, with horrifying results. And I am not sure that it is the story I like. Rather, it is Hart's beautiful prose.

The writing here is so economic, yet wonderfully descriptive - the small room that becomes the lovers tryst-loft, and the diary with a ribbon that marks when they will next meet is covered is simple yet evocotive prose. The opening page (of my copy anyway) would have to be some of the best paragraphs of prose in the English language. I would recommend the book for this page alone.This book reminds me of a lot of some French Erotic literature (i.e. The Story of O) more than any British writer.

This is a short book, so if you read it and don't like it you won't have wasted too much of your time on something you didn't like. But if you are like me, and can sometimes appreciate a book as much for how it is saying something as for what it is saying, I believe that Damage will have something for you. Either way, it is sure to touch you, by stirring some hidden corner of your soul, whether that is a corner you wanted to know or not. ( )

For anyone who has had a love affair with someone they can not have. Beautifully, poetically written. Truely shows the heart ache of the situation. ( )