The Bride Stripped Bare - Tapa dura

An explosive novel of sex, secrecy, and escape by an anonymous writer.

A woman disappears. Her car lies abandoned on a remote bluff; no body is found. She was the good wife, the good mother: mannerly, quiet, self-contained. But she has left behind an incendiary diary chronicling a disturbing journey of sexual awakening.

As the diary opens on her honeymoon in Morocco, she believes herself to be happy – or happy enough, anyway. Swiftly, this security masquerading as love fractures in an act of massive betrayal, only to propel her into a world of desire and fantasy and recklessness. What begins for her in the imagination ends in a tangle of sheets, in drowning spiral of obsession and release. She finds an unlikely heroine to inspire her in a dusty, rare manuscript written by an anonymous woman in the 1600s, a cry from the heart for women to live and love freely. With this as guide, she dares to rupture convention, learning, for the first time, the intoxicating power of knowing what she wants and how to get it. The question is, how long can her soul sustain a perilous double life?

Coolly impassioned, ‘The Bride Stripped Bare’ tells shocking truths about love and sex. These are the kind of revelations that best friends whisper to each other and then decide to forget they ever revealed. Couched in a deceptively simple style, its gorgeous, incantatory rhythms will make you question whether it is ever entirely possible to know another person.

The author has had two previous novels published to critical acclaim, with reviewers hailing the freshness and power of her writing. In the tradition of women over the centuries, she has decided to conceal her name in order to allow herself utter freedom in the writing of this novel.