No catches, no fine print just unadulterated book loving, with your favourite books saved to your own digital bookshelf.
New members get entered into our monthly draw to win £100 to spend in your local bookshop Plus lots lots more…
Find out moreIt could be said that we are in a Golden Age for Provocative fiction. With more and more authors releasing books that explore the various realms of sexuality while still offering social commentary and a concentrated examination of human feelings and attitudes throughout. So with that in mind, why not test your fictional limits and see the range of provocative prose we have on offer!
A Wall Street Journal bestseller. There’s nothing richer than a second chance in the steamy second book of New York Times bestselling author J.S. Scott’s Accidental Billionaires series. Aiden Sinclair was a commercial fisherman before he suddenly came into his billionaire inheritance—not that he’s complaining. Being a Sinclair does have its perks. But things were simpler before the money. He may have been dirt poor, but he loved his job and fully intended to always come back from the sea to his girlfriend, Skye Weston, so they could move toward something more permanent. Or at least that had been the plan…until he returned from a two-month fishing trip to discover she had moved away and was marrying somebody else. It tore his world apart. Now Skye’s back in town after nearly a decade. She’s a single mother and just as beautiful as ever. However, for some odd reason, she appears to hate him, when it should be Aiden who wants nothing to do with the woman who dumped him. Unfortunately, more than nine years of separation have done nothing to put a damper on their white-hot chemistry. But even if those feelings are real, Skye has been keeping secrets. The truth of the past is about to come to light, and there is so much more at stake than just Aiden’s heart...
Written in Singlish - “a tossed salad of the different languages and Chinese dialects that the country’s multiethnic population speaks” - this exhilarating novel follows brazen Jazzy’s mission to marry a wealthy “ang moh” (white) man. Almost 27, she warns her friends that ”if we don’t get married, engaged or even nail down a boyfriend soon—my god, we might as well go ahead and book a room at Singapore Casket… But luckily for us, we still have one big hope: ang moh guys”, because “if you wear a tight tight dress or short short skirt, these ang mohs will still steam over you”. To this end, Jazzy’s life is an intense cycle of spending her days working for a newspaper editor who likes to “rubba rubba” his employees, followed by long nights at fancy clubs. Through her predatory attitude and enduring of a whole lot of objectification, this novel is razor-sharp on male entitlement, inequality, racial stereotypes and global capitalism. Indeed, Jazzy wasn’t always a Sarong Party Girl herself: “I would see women who are so obviously going after guys just for status and really look down on them. What kind of woman is so pathetic to chase after a husband just for the kind of handbag, car or condo they can buy them?” And then one night, it seems that enough is enough. Jazzy has an epiphany at dawn after a one hell of a wake-up call night out. What a fresh, funny and wildly acerbic treat this is.
She wasn't meant to fall in love with me. And she certainly wasn't meant to see the monster I hide. My emotions were firmly locked away, never to be found, but as much as I control most things in life, I couldn't control my heart. She exposed my darkest desires, and begged for them and I unleashed hell on her body, while I shattered her heart. I made her kneel, but in that moment I broke the only jewel I ever owned. What will she do when she learns the truth I hide? Behind every shattered heart is a fractured soul. I was always broken. He believes he's responsible, but he wasn't the one to fragment my sanity. Even though he hid his depravity behind a suit and tie, I uncovered it. And I found more to the monster. In our darkness, I discovered emotion so profound I hungered for it. Begged for him to give me everything he could. The one thing I didn't count on was my heart getting in the way. I did kneel. I did care. And then I fell. What will he do when he sees my tormented pieces? Contains mature themes...
The pendulum has shifted in Catherine's life once again. Four years after peeling back the curtain on The Janus Chamber, we find her now ironically working as a political journalist, settled into a mundane routine and dating life because she chose to tell the truth about Inana Luna instead of embracing a life of decadence with The Juliette Society. Meeting a man who reignites her passion for cinema and guilt-free sex makes her realize what she's been missing, but an unwanted scandal douses the flame. Forced to lay low, she finds an opportunity to take back her career with a human interest story in Honduras, but there are people who see Catherine's article as a threat and will do everything they can to stop her from writing. The world she finds is unlike anything she's ever seen. Catherine is The Mismade Girl, and as her life is turned upside down, she must choose to either perish . . . or be remade anew.
This book is a collection of five short stories, each very different but with central theme of all of them desire and how it manifests itself in different ways. Each story is set in a different location and range in time from pre-second World War to the present day. Although I enjoyed all of the stories, there were a couple that stood out to me and I would have liked these to continue, so I could find out more about the characters and what they did next. Overall, this is a really enjoyable book and is nice and easy to dip in and out of, by reading a story at a time. I would really recommend this book. Nicola Coen, A LoveReading Ambassador
This book is a collection of five short stories, each very different but with central theme of all of them desire and how it manifests itself in different ways. Each story is set in a different location and range in time from pre-second World War to the present day. Although I enjoyed all of the stories, there were a couple that stood out to me and I would have liked these to continue, so I could find out more about the characters and what they did next. Overall, this is a really enjoyable book and is nice and easy to dip in and out of, by reading a story at a time. I would really recommend this book. Nicola Coen, A LoveReading Ambassador
Until recently, Julia hadn't had sex in three years. But now: a one-night stand is accusing her of breaking his penis; a sexually confident lesbian is making eyes at her over confrontational modern art; and she's wondering whether trimming her pubes makes her a bad feminist. Julia's about to learn that she's been looking for love - and satisfaction - in all the wrong places.... Frank, filthy and very, very funny, In at the Deep End is a brilliant debut from a major new talent. #ImInAtTheDeepEnd
Oh my word! How to describe this wonderfully clever, deeply dark and immensely satisfying read… every now and then a book comes along that surprises you, in the best possible way, and this is one of them. Five people, connected, somehow, with three murders, how on earth does everything link together? The first paragraphs slipped straight from the page and into my consciousness before awareness hit and I sat bolt upright. Will Carver creates an almost conversational tone which sits at odds with the content, creating a greater intimacy with the words and they land with hammer hard precision. The short intense chapters highlight one of the characters at a time, there is no explanation as to who is the focus, none is needed. A slight jolt of awareness as understanding settled after the first few sentences of each chapter kept me on constant alert. I can genuinely say that I had absolutely no idea where this was going, I stayed in each moment, sucked in the words, and feel as the story has tattooed itself on my mind. Good Samaritans is a provocative, heady, unique, challenging read and it is absolutely blimmin wonderful! Do I recommend it? With my heart and soul, yes I most certainly do!
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Literature has addressed sex throughout history. The joys and complexities are shown in 'The Song of Solomon' in the Bible. Byron, Chacer and Donne are famous for their compemplations on sex and desire.
Provocative prose is not simply pornographic, and product created simply to excite and arouse. Provocative prose stands apart as it is able to offer excitement while also deliviering social commentary and an examination of human feelings and behaviour. This genre can help you to think more deeply about sex, desire and how are attitudes to this topic are formed and what impact they have.
One of the most famous literary erotica would be Lady Chatterly's Lover by D.H. Lawrence, which manages to combine titilation and provocation while also offering character development, and an examination of the theme.
While some will still find these books shocking and a step too far. However there are marvelous modern authors such as Henry Miller, Anais Nin, and Annie Rice with her 'Sleeping Beauty' series which was published under the name Anne Roquelaure. With the development and exploration of this genre, there is a wide and varied selection of books for those interested in indulging.