2012 National Leather Association International Writing Award Finalist! Pauline Reage Novel Award

In the spring of 1975 Eve Sloan, a 22-year-old college dropout, was living in a shabby tenement apartment in New York’s East Village, workings days as a clerk in a bookstore while her nights were occupied with casual sex, drugs, and writing bad poetry. One day in a Soho gallery she is accosted by Roger Nettles, a wealthy venture capitalist, with whom she ends up having sex in her apartment. Roger, an experienced dominant, quickly sizes her up as a born submissive and proceeds to introduce her to spanking and bondage, to which she responds enthusiastically. Increasingly dissatisfied with her aimless existence while experiencing ecstatic pleasures unknown before, she accepts his offer to come live with him as his slave, agreeing to accept a life of total dependence in which she has no rights of her own but an absolute obligation to submit to all of her Master’s desires.

As the live-in companion of a wealthy man she is forced to abandon her bohemian ways and is thrust awkwardly into fashionable society, where she becomes known as a great beauty. In the course of her three-year odyssey she encounters a variety of colorful characters—the university professor who teaches history by day and conducts sadomasochistic orgies by night, a dominatrix doctor, a rock drummer with a spanking fetish, a fashion photographer she poses for and who lusts after her, the fellow submissive with the fragile ego whom she befriends and tries to protect, and Olympia, Roger’s former lover and now bitter business rival, who guesses her secret life and uses it to torment her. Eve’s adventures include being a guest at a dinner party of sadomasochists in which the maid is caned, participating in a spanking party and in a terrifying orgy with two other submissive girls.

But she finds her greatest pleasures when alone with her Master in his luxury apartment, in his bed, or over his knee, or bound naked to a cross or a bench in the room he has turned into his own private dungeon. In time though, even these pleasures are not enough, for what she craves most of all is to be truly loved by her moody work-obsessed Master. When she comes to feel neglected, she is finally driven to rebel, provoking a crisis that will end up changing her life forever.