She was a Director of Haymarket Publishing and founded Gallery Poets before going on to produce a number of West End plays. The MP enjoys a brief period of sexual bliss, meeting Anna in various European cities and having sex with her in unlikely places.

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. Some of the people she encountered saw that trail and run away, most did not see it but were attracted to the sheer hypnotic elegance of the movement.Josephine Hart (1942-2011) was the bestselling author of Damage, Sin, Oblivion and The Reconstructionist. 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.

I wrote in longhand, on a lined copy book and I believe, though the originals are now in Boston, that few changes were made to these opening chapters when the novel was published in early 1991. 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. 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. 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. Much is made of Anna’s dark past (it is dark but I won’t reveal why) although I found this aspect of the story a little too contrived, particularly the scenecs where Anna’s mother verbally warns Martyn that Anna has a tortured past and in another scene, when Anna’s stepfather does similar.On a superficial level this might be about a moment of falling in love, but it is a lot deeper than that. the car smash; the letter we shouldn't have opened; the lump in the breast or groin; the blinding flash. 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. 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.

We believe that the untried soul, trapped in its young prison, might have flown free and known the joy that we still seek. And to watch those trapped by genius forced to sacrifice themselves, and those trapped by talent to emulate them. In a review for Kirkus Reviews, it was said that "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", while being described as "Elliptical, haunting, and altogether extraordinary.Luis Malle made a stunningly successful film with Juliette Binoche and Jeremy Iron in the key roles. He is a man who appears to have everything: wealth, a beautiful wife and children, and a prestigious political career in Parliament. It took me some time to send them to Ed who responded immediately: "You've no right not to finish it.