Josephine Hart writes The Truth About Love

Josephine Hart's novel, The Truth About Love, is available in paperback on 6th May, and this story of grief, love, and redemption has received such incredible reviews that we thought we'd share some of them with you!

‘This is a brave novel about hurt and the elusiveness of consolation, suggesting that if the pieces of a broken life can be picked up at all they are never going to fit together again. Hart’s people live beyond the confines of even her fiery and elegant prose and are impossible, once encountered, to forget. For a novel of average length, the scope is astoundingly broad.
Hart ranges widely and assertively through the mirrorland of Irish history…’
- Joseph O’Connor in The Guardian

‘This is not a tale about romantic, idealised love, the kind that comes with soaring strings and sweeping gestures, but about more dangerous kind of love: real, raw love, the sort of passion that can neither be controlled nor packaged. It’s a bleak tale, beautifully told, about the one burden we must all, as human beings, survive: love’
- Sarah Vine in The Times

‘An ambitious and poetic weaving of a long-ago family tragedy into the tragic history, and histories, of our time. Josephine Hart has come home in triumph’
- John Banville

‘The Truth is: love hurts. Particularly the kind of love which spills over into obsession. For as Josephine Hart chillingly shows in her latest novel, love can be a torture which is impossible to give up – whatever the price’
- Lucy Beresford in The Sunday Telegraph

‘There are echoes of Beckett and Joyce in Hart’s writing …Brilliant . . . In this compelling and remarkable book, Hart has written a moving lament for exile’ - Times Literary Supplement

‘…the depiction of grief here seems to have a truthfulness that goes beyond a novelist’s empathy. This is a curiously satisfying novel, characteristic of Josephine Hart in its moral seriousness. It takes on the condition of Ireland, the Troubles, as well as the small lives of a few individuals but the central point is well made: there is pain in the heart of love’
- Melanie McDonagh in the Evening Standard

‘A quiet masterpiece…. It is hard not to go hurtling through this book, with its controlled yet vast embrace of all that is terrifying about living.’
- New York Post

MORE ABOUT THE BOOK
A young man shields his terrible wounds from his mother; a husband believes he can love his wife back to life; a young girl puts her life on hold until her family can find their way back from blinding pain; a man admits to the helplessness of obsessive love.  Set in Ireland, this brilliant, intense novel tells the story of the O’Hara family who choose to remain in the place of their loss, and the stranger from Germany who has run from his.

Seven years in the writing, the tragic story of the O’Hara family allows Josephine Hart to explore the history of her homeland and the disturbing ties between love of family and love of country.  The Truth About Love is an uncompromising morality tale of grief and guilt, love and redemption.


MORE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Josephine Hart was born and raised in Ireland. She was a Director of Haymarket Publishing, founded Gallery Poets and produced a number of West End plays. She is the bestselling author of Damage, Sin, Oblivion, The Stillest Day and The Reconstructionist. Her work has been translated into twenty-seven languages. She is married to Maurice Saatchi and has two sons.  The Truth about Love is Josephine Hart’s first novel with Virago.

Since January 2004, Josephine has been hosting ‘The Josephine Hart Poetry Hour’ at The British Library, at which great actors gather to read great poetry.  Virago has published two poetry collections with accompanying CDs based on these events, Catching Life by the Throat (which has been integrated into the secondary school curriculum) and Words That Burn.
 

Posted 12/04/2010 16:38:26 by Emily Rowland with 1 comments.