A Journey Round a Darker Sun

The theme of Journey is dominance and submission for real, in an everyday setting, experienced by characters who have never heard of D/s, bdsm, femdom, alpha male or domestic discipline, or any other 'lifestyle' terms the net has enabled everyone with a kinked heart to validate and share. If you're looking for a lightweight sexy book of the normal kind, this isn't it and you'll waste your time and money.

Claire falls madly in love with Paul, a stunning but imperious young man. If the girl on the bed is Claire, then the beyond-words beauty at the bottom of my homepage would be Sabine, Paul's former girlfriend, with whose memory poor Claire has to compete. She is not in Paul's class, their love is unequal, and only absolute submission to him keeps her place in his attentions. And all of this is mirrored in its turn by Tristan, the boy who worships Claire with every breath. But things change for the better, and there is a happy ending.

Ranked in first place on the Erotica Readers & Writers Association’s spectacular smut list of modern genre classics at amazon.com, the Portfolio Editor told me she thought it better even than her lifetime favourite erotica, Story of O, which she read at least once a year. I was stunned, but very happy. That said, Journey isn't a copycat of Story of O in any way; it's not a bdsm novel as such, because I'm only interested in the middle two initials of that acronym, not the bondage or the masochism.