In an age where every sexual frontier seems to have been breached, it’s hard to believe there could still be unexplored corners, dark desires that few people dare make real. In the tradition of Josephine Hart’s masterpiece, Damage , Never the Face uses riveting storytelling to tackle a complex and provocative relationship – where the most exquisite passions are also the most dangerous…

The heroine of Never the Face is searching. Dissatisfied with love, bored with sex; in her experience, all lovers are predictably dull – and she longs for more, for an intensity she knows exists and has yet to discover. Just after her thirty-third birthday, she runs into David, an old flame who’s now married. David invites her to dinner. Then he says, “I spent the weekend choosing a stick to beat you with.”

With these words, unable to resist the allure of sexual submission, she falls into an abyss of violent intimacy and excruciating pleasure. But as their brutal bond begins to unravel, carrying them together into an unfathomable territory of increasing violence and sexual extremes, she begins to discover the full, destructive power of obsessive love – and gradually spins out of control.

Written in spare, savage prose, Never the Face shocks us into realizing there are people we know, friends perhaps, who are on dark, erotic journeys they dare not confess to. And they might just live next door.