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Audiobook3 hours
Sin
Written by Josephine Hart
Narrated by Naomi Frederick
Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
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About this audiobook
Ruth calls herself a malevolent creature, ruled since childhood by hatred and envy for her adopted sister, Elizabeth. She grew up in Elizabeth's shadow, always falling short of her goodness and generosity, constantly resenting her very presence in the family. As they grow old, Ruth sets out to destroy her without guilt or hesitation. Ruth will strike Elizabeth where she's most vulnerable-she will steal her husband and send her collapsing into ruin. Written in Hart's concise, striking prose, Sin is a powerful and compulsively readable exploration of hate-and the destruction and tragedy it begets.
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Author
Josephine Hart
Josephine Hart, Baroness Saatchi, was an Irish writer, theatrical producer, and television presenter who lived in London. Lady Saatchi wrote the New York Times bestselling novel Damage, which was the basis for the 1992 film of the same name, directed by Louis Malle and starring Jeremy Irons, Juliette Binoche and Rupert Graves.
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Reviews for Sin
Rating: 3.466101766101695 out of 5 stars
3.5/5
59 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5No one writes a biting, compulsively readable psychological drama like Ms Hart. This is a disturbing tale of obsession, sex and death.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Well, this was a silly little book. A book that treats writing like Juliet Binoche treats acting. That is to say, with a lot of insubstantial intensity, and mystic eyes. You can read Sin in a sitting, and get up feeling pensive, taciturn, and violent. Or you can read it in little chunks over a period of weeks, while you're giving your children a bath, like I did, and every time you open the book you have to remember how serious life is, how morbid, how dire, how dramatic. How everyone uses small sentences, and feels things deeply, so deeply. I read it before, years ago, and recently somehow via some used book shelf it came back into my life. The same edition too. Page 169 still seems to bear the blush of shame after my shuddering eye-roll. The last few lines:These questions long engage me. Do you have answers? Please. Please, answer me.Answer me, as I leave you now.As I leave you.As I leave.The only work of fiction I've seen trying to end on an echo effect, like a power ballad from the 80s. If the ending seems unforgivable, you should know that there are other disastrous lines in the book too. Like this one: Hours later, Dominick lay on top of me. And whispered love again. And again. Perhaps the music in his own head made him deaf to my silence."Deaf to my silence"? That's one of those lines that sounds complex and interesting, but in reality means nothing. Like Juliet Binoche again. She can be thinking of her grocery list, but as long as she fires up her "piercing depths" eye lock, you'd think she was decoding the fate of the world. Hart knows how to ratchet up the drama in the way a scene sounds, even if the plot is really a rather standard soap opera chain of events. Adultery, death, rivalry, hatred, love, etc. The pounding drum in the language, the constant syntactic reminders that This! Is! Dramatic! actually diffuse the drama from her character's troubles, much the way a soap opera's soundtrack can make light afternoon fare out of murder and betrayal. I am simultaneously reading Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, and Sin does not bear up well in contrast, since McCourt's delivery of disaster and wretchedness is at low volume, with no fanfare, no sonorous words, no short sentences drifting off into black. Unfair comparison, maybe, but... still.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5This book wasn't as good as Hart's Damage. It is the story of two sisters. One, Ruth, an actual birth daughter and the other, Elizabeth, her cousin, whose parents were killed in an accident. Ruth grows up hating Elizabeth but hiding it for the most part. Elizabeth is the total opposite. She is very flexible and does whatever she can to create a smooth life for the family. Even into and through their adulthood Ruth hates Elizabeth and it seems that she is constantly thinking about how she can hurt Elizabeth. This one is a train wreck also but I didn't think it was done as well.I don't think I can sincerely recommend this one and I find that very disappointing as Damage and Sin were just published by Virago Press in 2011. I find it quite sad that today the works they are publishing (or some of them) are quite inferior to what they published back in the day.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A Masterpiece on the premise and intricacies of Sibling Rivalry. Josephine Hart carries the reader down many a dark alleyway of the mind in what I consider one of the best first-person novels I have come across since Jules Verne's 20000 Leagues Under the Sea. It was captivating, riveting, and sometimes challenging to assimilate about the extent to which Ruth tried to upend her orphan sister Elizabeth. The plot snowballed from minor seeds of hate and envy into gargantuan leaps of Ruth taking over Elizabeth's life, which didn't seem fair, but it was enough to keep me vested in the entire story and see it to the very end. Definitely worth the read.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/53.5 stars. This short novel looks at the relationship between Ruth, the narrator, and Elizabeth--first cousins raised a sisters.Ruth has never forgiven Elizabeth for "taking her place" as the oldest child in her family, before Ruth was even born. Ruth desperately wants to be the only. And, as a bit of a sociopath, Ruth spends her entire life trying to beat and be Elizabeth. She steals her clothing, aims to steal boyfriends, everything in Ruth's life is about getting revenge on Elizabeth.This is quite well done and is well paced. It is creepy and sad and I could not help but wonder why Ruth is like this. Is it just innate confusion/jealousy based on how they were raised? Is she simply a sociopath and if it weren't this it would have been something else? Or was there some specific event that made her hate her sister-cousin so much? I really wanted a bit more of a reason--especially seeing how Ruth did not grow out of this behavior, she really doubled down in adulthood. I wonder if I missed something, or if no reason was given.