This Month's Featured Books
Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure
John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure has been described as the first erotic novel in English and is perhaps the greatest example of the genre. From the outset it was mired in disrepute. Cleland penned the novel to liberate himself from debtors' prison, and the book's manifestly lewd content led to its legal suppression within a year of publication. Though versions of the novel, nearly always abridged in some form, continued to find a way into print, the Memoirs remained an underground text until the 1960s. Only as that decade ushered in a culture less socially deferential and more sexually permissive was the moment opportune for the obscenity ban to be successfully challenged. Cleland's novel is a triumph of literary style, resting on his invention of an entirely new, vividly metaphoric, terminology for describing sexual pleasure.
Last Month's Featured Books
Every Shade of Black
EVERY SHADE OF BLACK is the continuing, heart-stopping love story of Sebastian Black and Suzanne Perry-Jackson, both previously introduced in EVERY SHADE OF BLUE, published in 2016. However, the sequel is a stand-alone read. The erotic tale continues as Sebastian, the beautiful blue-eyed surgeon, falls head over heels in love and lust with Suzanne, the stunning blonde mother of teenage twins who is in the process of getting a divorce. Astonishingly handsome, charming and successful, Sebastian has no trouble in finding dates, but abandoned by a violent father as a child, he is haunted by his past. He has always controlled his emotions, had been too scared to commit, and yet in Suzanne he feels he's discovered the love of his life. But Sebastian believes that before he can truly embrace a future with his soulmate, he needs closure from the brutality that filled his early life. In EVERY SHADE OF BLACK, Sebastian makes the difficult decision to seek out his father which reveals a shocking truth that leads him on a path of self-discovery. Meanwhile, Suzanne has serious complications of her own. Tatiana, her ex-husband's gorgeous young lover seems determined to ruin Suzanne's perfect new life. And Angelo, a psychotic, one-night stand who Suzanne encountered briefly before meeting Sebastian, is out there lurking in the shadows ready to make his move. Set in London, Surrey, Vancouver, the snowy delights of Whistler, British Columbia and Dubai, EVERY SHADE OF BLACK is an explicit love story that will leave the reader breathless.
The Month Before's Featured Books
The Charmed Life of Alex Moore
There are success stories - and there are true stories. How would you feel if everything in your life suddenly started to go . . . right? Six months ago, Alex Moore was stuck in a dead-end job, feeling her potential quietly slip away. Then, seemingly overnight, she launched her dream start-up and became one of London's fastest rising tech stars. At thirty-one, her life has just begun. But Alex's transformation isn't easy for those around her. Her friends are struggling to accept her rapid success, her parents worry she's burning out and her fiance is getting cold feet. Then weird things start to happen. Muggings, stalkers - even a wild claim that she murdered a stranger. But when Alex visits the Orkney Islands to recharge, weird turns into WTF. Because there she discovers the world's oldest secret - and it's a secret that Alex's stratospheric rise has royally messed up.
The Louisiana Republic
New York, and the world, have been transformed by an unexplained global catastrophe now known as 'the Dark'. Once a modest researcher, has now become an involuntary detective. He is recruited by her elder sister to find the missing daughter of a local gangster in a city in chaos where anarchy and violence are just a step away. A bold, hugely original, multi-genre, cracking read. A private eye in a reimagined New York, where the internet and electronic data is as dead as a dodo, is asked to trace a woman. Within the first few words Maxim Jakubowski thoroughly set the scene, within a short time I felt a part of this world, could stand in the streets and take a gawking look around me. The clipped sentences of the investigator hark back to private eye novels, yet this is no caricature. The characters sing with intensity, sitting on the edge of larger than life, they feel as real as real can be. I smirked, raised my eyebrows, and flinched (oh how I flinched), as we cleaved through dystopian, slipped inside erotica, and smashed into supernatural. Right up my street, I absolutely adored this read. ‘The Louisiana Republic’ is a tale that refuses to be labelled, it is quite simply a raw, provocative, unique experience for lovers of the written word. ~ Liz Robinson
On a Beautiful Day
It's a beautiful day in Manchester and four friends are meeting for a birthday lunch. But then they witness a shocking accident just metres away which acts as a catalyst for each of them. For Laura, it's a wake-up call to heed the ticking of her biological clock. Sensible Jo finds herself throwing caution to the wind in a new relationship. Eve, who has been trying to ignore the worrying lump in her breast, feels helpless and out of control. And happy-go-lucky India is drawn to one of the victims of the accident, causing long-buried secrets to rise to the surface.
LoveReading Top 10
