"Beautifully written. . . . Despite the controversial subject matter this is a tender and sympathetic portrait."—Bookseller"Controversial but sensitively handled."—Marie ClaireSusanna is a secretive child, obsessed with the father she has never known and determined that one day she will find...  more

"Beautifully written. . . . Despite the controversial subject matter this is a tender and sympathetic portrait."—Bookseller"Controversial but sensitively handled."—Marie ClaireSusanna is a secretive child, obsessed with the father she has never known and determined that one day she will find him. As an adolescent she becomes increasingly distanced from life at home with her mother and sister. When she finally discovers her father's address and seeks him out, she conceals her identity, beginning an illicit affair that can only end in disaster.Anne Peile lives in London. This is her first novel.

It's 1960 in the Panhandle town of Charnelle, Texas?a year and a half since sixteen-year-old Laura Tate's mother boarded a bus and mysteriously disappeared. Assuming responsibility for the Tate household, Laura cares for her father and three brothers and outwardly maintains a sense of calm. But...  more

It's 1960 in the Panhandle town of Charnelle, Texas?a year and a half since sixteen-year-old Laura Tate's mother boarded a bus and mysteriously disappeared. Assuming responsibility for the Tate household, Laura cares for her father and three brothers and outwardly maintains a sense of calm. But her balance is upset and the repercussions of her family's struggles are revealed when a chance encounter with a married man leads Laura into a complicated relationship for which she is unprepared. As Kennedy battles Nixon for the White House, Laura must navigate complex emotional terrain and choose whether she, too, will flee Charnelle. A heartfelt portrait of a young woman's reckoning with the paradoxes of love?eloquent, tender, and heart-wrenching?K. L. Cook's unforgettable debut novel marks the arrival of a significant new voice in American fiction.

At the tender age of fourteen, Sarah Clark is seduced by her thirty-eight-year-old English teacher, Caniel Carr, and becomes entangled in an illegal, erotic, passionate, and dangerous affair-a vicious meeting of minds and bodies that ends badly. Devastated by grief and longing, Sarah embarks...  more

At the tender age of fourteen, Sarah Clark is seduced by her thirty-eight-year-old English teacher, Caniel Carr, and becomes entangled in an illegal, erotic, passionate, and dangerous affair-a vicious meeting of minds and bodies that ends badly. Devastated by grief and longing, Sarah embarks upon a series of meaningless self-abasing sexual encounters, hoping to reclaim the intensity of that first relationship. Then, seven years later, Carr unexpectedly returns and Sarah is drawn again into a destructive coupling. Now that she is no longer an innocent young girl, is she strong enough to finally tame the beast within her? A modern Lolita, Taming the Beast is an emotionally unflinching and alluring tale that introduces a powerful new writer.

Ruined. Everything ruined. During the two years since her parents separated, Olivia had shuttled numbly between their North London homes. Her father and mother were consumed with their new lives: Ross, a professor, enamored of his beautiful new housemate, a former student; Emma involved with her...  more

Ruined. Everything ruined. During the two years since her parents separated, Olivia had shuttled numbly between their North London homes. Her father and mother were consumed with their new lives: Ross, a professor, enamored of his beautiful new housemate, a former student; Emma involved with her gallery and with her lover, Nick, a photographer. No safety now. For Olivia, not even the distractions of school and friends could ease the crushing feeling that she was now unnecessary. Perhaps a daughter who needed an appointment to see her own father wasn't worth seeing at all. And then Nick moved in with her mother, and Olivia had to surrender even the sanctuary of her own home. Always now, she could feel him watching her, his eyes wandering over her body. Often now, she crossed her arms self-consciously to cover her breasts. Nick was everything Olivia's father was not; he was blond and broad-shouldered, he smoked, he filled the house with growling jazz. And although she avoided him, he was persistent - offering a lift in his Jaguar, arranging a special dinner. Before long, Olivia was confiding in this stranger, the only adult who seemed to have the time or the desire to listen to her. Then one day, his hand lingered a moment too long on her shoulder, and Olivia could feel its warmth.

Fifteen-year-old Nina and her family are struggling to hold things together in the wake of the accidental death of her four-year-old brother several years earlier. Seeking refuge in her art, Nina's mother has painted a series of nude portraits of her remaining living child. As these haunting...  more

Fifteen-year-old Nina and her family are struggling to hold things together in the wake of the accidental death of her four-year-old brother several years earlier. Seeking refuge in her art, Nina's mother has painted a series of nude portraits of her remaining living child. As these haunting images go public, Nina is forced to deal with her burgeoning sexuality in front of a large and critical audience. With tension in the family reaching a breaking point, the portrait entitled Nina: Adolescence provokes a situation that will either be the engine of Nina's destruction-or the catalyst that enables her to finally surmount tragedy. In this mesmerizing first novel, Amy Hassinger captures the cruelties and passions of adolescence with eloquence, tenderness, and a fearless sensuality. In Nina, she has created an unforgettable character-and launched a stunning career.

Maya and Ilan have an unusual marriage: Maya agrees to tolerate Ilan's chronic infidelity as long as she can participate and he will never stray without her. To her surprise, she finds their threesomes as arousing as they are disturbing, and for a while, everything seems fine. But as Maya's...  more

Maya and Ilan have an unusual marriage: Maya agrees to tolerate Ilan's chronic infidelity as long as she can participate and he will never stray without her. To her surprise, she finds their threesomes as arousing as they are disturbing, and for a while, everything seems fine. But as Maya's writing career takes off and she becomes more independent, Ilan feels threatened, and opts for another kind of sexual experimentation-one that plays on Maya's fear and ultimately threatens her life. Meanwhile, Maya is drawn into another relationship, with a fateful third character. When her new liaison begins to mirror her marriage to Ilan, Maya discovers that her lover, seemingly a stranger, knows far more about her past than she has revealed. A compelling chronicle of obsession and power, 3 brings new immediacy to a timeless question: What is the greatest sacrifice you would make for love?

'I'm an artist, I make things meaningful...' Malachy Hawke - one of the century's great painters, but a mystery to his son, Ged, and to the world. When he dies in his remote house in Oregon, Ged is summoned to unravel his father's affairs and flies out from England with his son Calum. But they...  more

'I'm an artist, I make things meaningful...' Malachy Hawke - one of the century's great painters, but a mystery to his son, Ged, and to the world. When he dies in his remote house in Oregon, Ged is summoned to unravel his father's affairs and flies out from England with his son Calum. But they carry with them the baggage of a ruptured family, and discover when they get there that Malachy's life was not at all as they had imagined. Dark secrets emerge about Malachy's life and the genesis of many of his paintings, and Ged discovers disturbing parallels with his own crisis-ridden existance, in which sexual obsession has destroyed the normal family life he once enjoyed with his wife and son and daughter.

This is the story of the emotional awakening of a perceptive and precocious 14-year-old English girl, Tatum, while on vacation with her family in Tanzania.

A stunning and compelling portrait of two obsessed personalities and the perversely symbiotic relationship that draws them together.Aurora Jeanine Johnson is an unwed mother from Savannah, Georgia, desperate to sculpt a new life--and a new body-- in California, where the quest for the perfect...  more

A stunning and compelling portrait of two obsessed personalities and the perversely symbiotic relationship that draws them together.Aurora Jeanine Johnson is an unwed mother from Savannah, Georgia, desperate to sculpt a new life--and a new body-- in California, where the quest for the perfect butt or bicep reaches religious intensity. Spending every spare moment training at the gym, Aurora is barely getting by--until she meets the man who will offer her everything she most desires.Charles Worthington is a wealthy eccentric, rich enough to indulge his every decadent whim and fantasy. Aurora is his sexual ideal, the raw material from which he will shape his masterpiece. He will transform Aurora into the woman of his dreams -- and fantasies -- no matter the cost.To achieve their common goal, Aurora hands over complete control of her life to Charles. He dictates her diet, her lifestyle, her training--and when and how much she'll take of the body-altering drugs he "prescribes" for her. He decides whom she sees and where she goes. And what kinky games of his own devising they will play.For Aurora, everything that Charles asks is a small price to pay to become the woman she's always dreamed of being. Or is it?Chemical Pink is a gothic duet that explores the boundary between obsession and pathology.

In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers.  When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's...  more

In a crumbling seaside hotel on the coast of Japan, quiet seventeen-year-old Mari works the front desk as her mother tends to the off-season customers.  When one night they are forced to expel a middle-aged man and a prostitute from their room, Mari finds herself drawn to the man's voice, in what will become the first gesture of a single long seduction. In spite of her provincial surroundings, and her cool but controlling mother, Mari is a sophisticated observer of human desire, and she sees in this man something she has long been looking for.   The man is a proud if threadbare translator living on an island off the coast. A widower, there are whispers around town that he may have murdered his wife.  Mari begins to visit him on his island, and he soon initiates her into a dark realm of both pain and pleasure, a place in which she finds herself more at ease even than the translator. As Mari's mother begins to close in on the affair, Mari's sense of what is suitable and what is desirable are recklessly engaged.

From award-winning debut novelist Leslie Schwartz comes this stirring, erotic tale of a young woman whose grief over her sister's unsolved murder propels her into a torrid and dangerous affair. Louise Goldblum is the new "it" girl on the San Francisco art scene, a sculptor on the cusp of...  more

From award-winning debut novelist Leslie Schwartz comes this stirring, erotic tale of a young woman whose grief over her sister's unsolved murder propels her into a torrid and dangerous affair. Louise Goldblum is the new "it" girl on the San Francisco art scene, a sculptor on the cusp of national stardom, when her beloved older sister Esther is shot and killed in a motel room in an old California ghost town. Esther's sudden, mysterious death sends Louise into a tailspin of mourning and, after a night of hard drinking, into the arms of Zeke Heirholm, a controversial photographer. Volatile and furtive, Zeke draws Louise into a gripping and perilous sexual liaison -- and a precarious new terrain of caustic pleasure. At first, Zeke's hypnotic charms seem to offer Louise escape from the haunting events of her life -- including her tumultuous childhood as the youngest member of the eccentric Goldblum family. But as Louise's trysts with Zeke become increasingly violent, so, too, does the power of her memories. The further Louise becomes entangled in Zeke's web, the deeper her mind retreats into the buried layers of her past, revisiting the turbulent and often self-destructive episodes that typified the Goldblum clan. Desperate to escape her chaotic past and tortured present, Louise risks everything -- her career as an artist, her relationship with her family -- in hopes of carving a path through the debris of her sister's death and her own shattered life. Winner of the James Jones Literary Society award for best first novel, this profound and gripping psychological exploration is turning heads in the literary world with its powerful portrayal of a young woman hounded by grief. At once acutely perceptive, deeply engaging, and daringly lyrical, Jumping the Green marks the debut of a breathtaking new literary voice.

Written when Cathy Coote was nineteen, Innocents is a taut, wickedly clever descent into the anatomy of an obsession, the debut of a precociously assured and provocative young literary voice. Forcing someone vulnerable and naive into a sexual relationship to satisfy a twisted desire is...  more

Written when Cathy Coote was nineteen, Innocents is a taut, wickedly clever descent into the anatomy of an obsession, the debut of a precociously assured and provocative young literary voice. Forcing someone vulnerable and naive into a sexual relationship to satisfy a twisted desire is perverted, even evil. But when the perpetrator is a sixteen-year-old schoolgirl, is she culpable? And if the victim is her thirty-four-year-old teacher, shouldn't he have known better? When the nameless young narrator of Innocents decides to seduce her teacher, she immediately realizes that the power of her sexuality is greater than she ever imagined. She leaves the aunt and uncle who are her guardians and moves in with her teacher; together, they quickly embark on a journey into their darkest desires. Unforgettable, disturbing, and morally complex, Innocents permanently unsettles our notions of innocence, experience, and power, and suggests that we all are culpable. "Compelling stuff, sexy and disturbingly frank.... A brilliant debut." -- Meg Stewart, The Bulletin

After is a stunning debut about an intense erotic affair that takes place over one twenty-four hour period.The woman is unnamed. The time is unspecified. The place is a motel somewhere in California. She is a widow, and it has been one year since her husband's death at the hands of Muslim...  more

After is a stunning debut about an intense erotic affair that takes place over one twenty-four hour period.The woman is unnamed. The time is unspecified. The place is a motel somewhere in California. She is a widow, and it has been one year since her husband's death at the hands of Muslim extremists. She has decided, on the basis of a chance encounter, to take a Muslim lover. He is courtly, solicitous, understanding, and understandably nervous. He is married and has two daughters. She has had no lover since her husband's death. Their graphically recounted affair is passionate and disturbing, and it veers into violence. How can desire so quickly transmogrify into hate? How does prejudice contaminate belief? Can grief ever be expunged? Can we purify ourselves of our pasts, redeem ourselves for the future, or are we consigned to a vicious cycle of recrimination and revenge? A mesmerizing work of fiction that has the commercial appeal of Josephine Hart's Damage but which displays the cool control of Jim Crace and Michael Ondaatje, After is a riveting story of universal appeal, a timeless tale for the way we live now.

A novel exploring the connection between grief and love, this is the story of Ellie Lowell, a college graduate shattered by her mother's sudden death, whose return to the rural North Carolina town of her childhood marks the beginning of an obsessive, destructive love affair.

Fiona, an accomplished young artist, falls in love with Raymond. An older married man.  Their haunted relationship evolves in a floating melange of restaurants and hotel rooms against the looming backdrop of their separate, anonymous cities.  Although erotically charged, the...  more

Fiona, an accomplished young artist, falls in love with Raymond. An older married man.  Their haunted relationship evolves in a floating melange of restaurants and hotel rooms against the looming backdrop of their separate, anonymous cities.  Although erotically charged, the affair is never consummated - yet the love Fiona feels intensifies into an obsession that continues to possess her long after Raymond leaves her.  Along the way, at receptions and restaurant tables, at dinner parties and on trips, Fiona meets other men and women in relationships that are coming together or falling apart-friendships, marriages, love affairs - each offering their own version of love's nature.  And, throughout, Raymond's wife Helen holds a central place.  For Fiona, Helen herself is "the other woman" - mysterious, enviable and untouchable.

Mary and Ross were in Rome on a junior-year-abroad program when they had their baby, Natassia, who was conceived on a dare: “Do it with no birth control,” another couple had challenged. “We’ll do it if you do it . . .” Mary and Ross are unmarried, ambitious, and way...  more

Mary and Ross were in Rome on a junior-year-abroad program when they had their baby, Natassia, who was conceived on a dare: “Do it with no birth control,” another couple had challenged. “We’ll do it if you do it . . .” Mary and Ross are unmarried, ambitious, and way too young, and though smitten with their daughter, they eventually—and with regret—abdicate responsibility to Ross’s parents, who raise Natassia in the intellectually stimulating (and seemingly loving) atmosphere of their Manhattan apartment. Fifteen years later, 1989, Natassia is an honors student and a violin player. Despite the absence of her mother, a world-class modern dancer who survives by living in the moment, and her father, a physician in the Pacific Northwest, Natassia is thriving—until her mysterious romance with a man she will not identify derails her so profoundly that her parents, grandparents, and even her godparents, Nora and Christopher, must come together to save her. A dancer, a doctor, two book editors, a painter and a psychotherapist—all are forced to turn away from and also draw upon the creative and intellectual endeavors that consume and define them. Struggling to buoy Natassia, her guardians sink along with her into the deepest darkness.Mary, a Korean war orphan, must learn from step one how to provide the mother love she herself never received; indeed, the daughter's breakdown sparks the mother's coming-of-age. Ross, still in love with Mary after ten years’ separation, must face the consequences of his obsessions. And Nora and Christopher, burdened by a decades-old secret, use desperate measures to save Natassia—and their marriage.Within the intimate universe of one unorthodox family, Falling in Love with Natassia explores the blurred lines between love that heals and sex that harms. These characters will shock you with how forcefully their hurt hearts demand restitution; they will mystify you with the paths they choose as they move toward recovery and redemption.

Crackling with eroticism and suspense, the seductive new book that everyone is talking about probes the secret world of phone sex and one woman who becomes empowered by what she discovers there. Not since Erica Jong's Fear of Flying has a novel so masterfully mined the relationship between...  more

Crackling with eroticism and suspense, the seductive new book that everyone is talking about probes the secret world of phone sex and one woman who becomes empowered by what she discovers there. Not since Erica Jong's Fear of Flying has a novel so masterfully mined the relationship between sexuality and identity. On the surface, Julia Sterling's life seems blessed. Married to a renowned psychiatrist and living on Manhattan's tony Upper East Side, Julia deeply loves her stepson and is forging a career as a journalist. When a writing job exposes her to the world of phone sex, Julia glimpses a world that stirs her erotic fantasies but threatens her carefully constructed reality. As she explores her emotional and sexual connections to the men she knows and several she will never meet, she confronts evil, perversity, and her own passions. Tracing the currents of desire, illusion, and psychological manipulation,Lip Service is an astonishingly vivid glimpse into one woman's inner life. At the same time, this electrifying thriller grips the reader as it builds toward a shattering climax. M.J. Rose has delivered a debut novel unlike anything yet experienced in erotic fiction. Lip Service establishes her as a powerful storyteller.

In a brasserie just off the Boulevard St Germain, a distinguished novelist watches, entranced, the motions of a young woman's hands folding a restaurant bill into a paper boat. This passing observation - slim fingers against a white linen tablecloth - provides the springboard for a compelling...  more

In a brasserie just off the Boulevard St Germain, a distinguished novelist watches, entranced, the motions of a young woman's hands folding a restaurant bill into a paper boat. This passing observation - slim fingers against a white linen tablecloth - provides the springboard for a compelling story of desire and jealousy in Brina Svit's explosive new novel, Con Brio. The respected author's comfortable life vanishes the instant he admires this strange woman's hands; the discipline of forty productive years dissolves. On an impulse he proposes to her. She answers without hesitation: yes, she will marry him, but on her terms. She will live with him, but they are to remain strangers. Soon Kati has driven Tibor's housekeeper, secretary and even his cat from his home. And as she continues to hold Tibor at arms' length, he goes from being a cool observer of the chaos she creates, to a man driven wild by passion and jealousy. With a brutality offset only by the elegance and subtlety of Svit's writing. Con Brio - like Death in Venice before it - dramatises the ruinous consequences of sexual obsession.

Luther Fox, a loner, haunted by his past, makes his living as an illegal fisherman -- a shamateur. Before everyone in his family was killed in a freak rollover, he grew melons and played guitar in the family band. Robbed of all that, he has turned his back on music. There's too much emotion...  more

Luther Fox, a loner, haunted by his past, makes his living as an illegal fisherman -- a shamateur. Before everyone in his family was killed in a freak rollover, he grew melons and played guitar in the family band. Robbed of all that, he has turned his back on music. There's too much emotion in it, too much memory and pain. One morning Fox is observed poaching by Georgie Jutland. Chance, or a kind of willed recklessness, has brought Georgie into the life and home of Jim Buckridge, the most prosperous fisherman in the area and a man who loathes poachers, Fox above all. But she's never fully settled into Jim's grand house on the water or into the inbred community with its history of violent secrets. After Georgie encounters Fox, her tentative hold on conventional life is severed. Neither of them would call it love, but they can't stay away from each other no matter how dangerous it is -- and out on White Point it is very dangerous. Set in the dramatic landscape of Western Australia, Dirt Music is a love story about people stifled by grief and regret; a novel about the odds of breaking with the past and about the lure of music. Dirt music, Fox tells Georgie, is "anything you can play on a verandah or porch, without electricity." Even in the wild, Luther cannot escape it. There is, he discovers, no silence in nature.

With a blend of erotic and gothic sensibilities, Koja explores the facets of obsession in a three-way relationship between a man and two women set against the gritty downtown backdrop of late-night clubs and a decadent art scene.

Meg White leads a comfortable life as a chef in Portland. Nothing prepared her for a man like Jordan Blair, the rich, magnetic stranger who seduces her and introduces her to a life of luxury -- and sin. Obsessed with Jordan and drawn to his dark sexual kinks, Meg allows him to transform her into...  more

Meg White leads a comfortable life as a chef in Portland. Nothing prepared her for a man like Jordan Blair, the rich, magnetic stranger who seduces her and introduces her to a life of luxury -- and sin. Obsessed with Jordan and drawn to his dark sexual kinks, Meg allows him to transform her into a sophisticated beauty with no ties to her past. But soon she's trapped in a web of lust and sexual depravity. She doesn't know whether the man who's consumed her life is good or evil, whether her nights are filled with pleasure or pain -- or how she'll ever survive.

After her sister is murdered, Nora Tibbs moves to a small college town near Sacramento. She believes that Franny's lover, Michael, is responsible for her death. Nora becomes entangled in a vicious web of wanting to know more about her sister's life and the dark fascination that Michael holds for...  more

After her sister is murdered, Nora Tibbs moves to a small college town near Sacramento. She believes that Franny's lover, Michael, is responsible for her death. Nora becomes entangled in a vicious web of wanting to know more about her sister's life and the dark fascination that Michael holds for both sisters.

An intricately emotional and erotic debut and a haunting foray into the deepest recesses of a sexual underworld, Stacking in Rivertown is a novel of love, pain, and redemption. Young, beautiful, and happily married, Beth is finally learning to relax and enjoy her success as a bestselling...  more

An intricately emotional and erotic debut and a haunting foray into the deepest recesses of a sexual underworld, Stacking in Rivertown is a novel of love, pain, and redemption. Young, beautiful, and happily married, Beth is finally learning to relax and enjoy her success as a bestselling novelist. She has at last achieved the well-adjusted life she always wanted; it almost seems too good to be true. And it is. Beneath her thin veneer of normalcy lies a terrifying history of sadism, sexual torture, tragic violence -- and a single long-buried secret that could destroy her. Beth is scarred by childhood abuse: as a sixteen-year-old runaway, she was picked up by Ben, an upmarket pimp whose girls are virtually slaves and who specializes in expensive sadomasochistic "plays" for wealthy clients. In one of those plays, Beth was stabbed and her best friend (and lover), a fellow young prostitute, was savagely murdered in front of her eyes. Now, recaptured by Ben, she struggles to remember what happened and who did it. Stacking in Rivertown marks the auspicious debut of a refreshingly bold new writer. In the bestselling tradition of Thomas Harris and David Lindsey, Barbara Bell plunges readers deep inside the mind of a woman struggling to survive and rebuild her life despite a harrowing past. As Beth flees for her life, fighting to get her revenge and somehow learning to love without pain, Stacking in Rivertown hurtles its readers toward a terrifying and unforgettable climax.