Sin - Softcover

Hart, Josephine

3.42

946 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 009925381X ISBN 13: 9780099253815

Publisher: Arrow Books Ltd, 1993

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Ruth is beautiful, intelligent and privileged, but she can never be satisfied - there is a moral vacuum where her heart should be. She envies her cousin Elisabeth and this obsession leads her inexorably to tragedy. By the author of "Damage".

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Review:

Sin, like Josephine Hart's third novel The Stillest Day, is an explicitly cautionary tale. Ruth Ashbridge is, from childhood, obsessively jealous of her orphaned cousin Elizabeth. At first, her envy leads her into only minor misbehaviour--adopting her smile, stealing her jewellery and silk underwear. Yet these small thefts quickly escalate into major transgressions as Ruth sets about stealing Elizabeth's husband and her happiness.

The confessional nature of Hart's first-person narrative suits the outpouring of hatred and envy. Ruth's position is succinctly summed up: "Like Satan before the Fall, I came to hate the very nature of goodness, to fear its power." However, her emotion is occasionally overemphasised and the descriptions of her overwrought, resulting in Ruth sounding unintentionally comic. She says of her own marriage to Dominick: "We were balanced. His love. My coldness."

With Sin, Josephine Hart aims to create a modern biblical parable. In order to foreground the didactic content of her novel, Hart keeps characterisation to a minimum, shunning the complex psychology and narrative tension of her first novel Damage. In Hart's world, sin--succumbing to an impulse in complete disregard of its consequences--leads inescapably to tragedy. Through that tragedy, the heroine will learn too late the true value of goodness. --Vanessa Cook

Review:

The reader looks on with mingled shock and fascination . . . a "tour de force." "The New York Times" Shocking . . . unrelenting in its intensity . . . you won t be able to put it down. "Cosmopolitan" A remarkable talent. "Washington Post Book World""

The reader looks on with mingled shock and fascination . . . a tour de force. The New York Times

Shocking . . . unrelenting in its intensity . . . you won t be able to put it down. Cosmopolitan
A remarkable talent. Washington Post Book World"

"The reader looks on with mingled shock and fascination . . . a tour de force." --The New York Times

"Shocking . . . unrelenting in its intensity . . . you won't be able to put it down." --Cosmopolitan
"A remarkable talent." --Washington Post Book World

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