Damage: INSPIRATION FOR THE NETFLIX SERIES OBSESSION

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He will always be Freddy Honeychurch in Room with a View for me (yes, I know he has been in dozens of things since Room but I’ve avoided those other things and the character of Martyn is just all wrong for Freddy.

The book is located on a spectrum that is far earlier and far deeper than the cautionary tale of power and betrayal, it offers a glimpse into the primitive, the instinctual, the predetermined forces which govern our psyche of which we have little knowledge and over which we have not much control.

Be it awakening from deep sleep rather than shallow existence, from not feeling into being powerfully overwhelmed by emotions, from building a false self, into being released from the pretenses, from longing for wealth and success into being fused with the significant Other. Josephine Hart’s international bestselling novels include Damage, Sin, Oblivion, and The Truth About Love. A quick read of the jacket blurb and a couple of choice quotes from the book and you know that this is car-crash reading – horrible, uncomfortable but you keep turning the pages nonetheless.

Always an obsessive reader, I had read six books a week during a particular four years in a small town in Ireland after a double family tragedy, and continued this voracious consumption of novels after I left Ireland. Photograph: Allstar/Cinetext Portrait of an obsession … Juliette Bincohe and Jeremy Irons in Damage, directed by Louis Malle (1992). A production of The Vortex, of which I was the producer, was still running in the West End and I was planning a another, of Iris Murdoch's The Black Prince. From a psychological point of view this might be seen also as primal original event which will set into motion an avalanche of other equally inescapable and devastating events that will impact upon the lives of those at the epicentre and those at the peripheries.

As well writing novels, she was a `poetry evangelist' and her Josephine Hart Poetry Hour at the British Library inspired two edited poetry books: Catching Life By the Throat and Words that Burn.

A post-theatre dinner with Ed Victor, whom I did not know well at that time, resulted in his request to see the opening chapters of this novel, the writing of which my husband believed was "what I should be doing". Knowing cats, a lifetime of cats, what is left is a sediment of sorrow quite different from that due to humans: compounded of pain for their helplessness, of guilt on behalf of us all. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Portrait of an obsession … Juliette Bincohe and Jeremy Irons in Damage, directed by Louis Malle (1992). But done well, with the pastry crisp and the fish moist (a delicate balancing act, much like the picture above), it is delicious.And while I did have trouble accepting that an intelligent man, who was in the public spotlight, would risk all that he had for a roll in the hay with this particular girl (any other girl, yes maybe), the story was engrossing. After Damage and Sin comes Oblivion--and that's just what most readers will wish for as they peruse the pages of this pretentious novel. He climbs up a flight of stairs to the top floor, opens the unlocked door to the apartment, and is shocked to see his father making love to his fiancée.

The MP runs down the stairs completely naked, finding Martyn dead, sprawled out on the ground floor. the car smash; the letter we shouldn't have opened; the lump in the breast or groin; the blinding flash. there are those born in rolling countryside who are really only at ease in the intense and busy loneliness of the city. This reveals the second assumption which Josephine makes in her novels and nowhere better than in Damage.

Some find it in a place of their birth; others may leave a seaside town, parched, and find themselves refreshed in the desert. But his life lacks passion, and his aching emptiness drives him to an all-consuming, and ultimately catastrophic, relationship with his son’s fiancée. We believe that the untried soul, trapped in its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy that we still seek. It is rooted in the psychology and in the case of Damage it is Anna Barton's psycho-erotic power which both creates the man – as he sees it – and which destroys him.