The Bride Stripped Bare - Softcover

Gemmell, Nikki

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0060591889 ISBN 13: 9780060591885

Publisher: Harper Perennial, 2005

Synopsis

A woman disappears, leaving behind an incendiary diary chronicling a journey of sexual awakening. To all who knew her, she was the good wife: happy, devoted, content. But the diary reveals a secret self, one who's discovered that her new marriage contains mysteries of its own. She has discovered a forgotten Elizabethan manuscript that dares to speak of what women truly desire, and inspired by its revelations, she tastes for the first time the intoxicating power of knowing what she wants and how to get it. The question is: How long can she sustain a perilous double life?

About this title

Review:

"The sex is rude and raunchy and exactly where you want it."--Elle

"A powerful novel that does not flinch from strong emotion or description...luminous."--London Times

"One of the few truly original voices to emerge in a long time."--Time Out New York

"An intensely honest look at a woman's inner thoughts and desires."--Dallas Morning News

"Artful...cannily perceptive...this unusual but strangely compelling novel offers an intimate chronicle of change and self-discovery."--Publishers Weekly

"Superbly executed: suspense, psychodrama, anger, tenderness and terror mingle with the restlessness of a vast, overpowering landscape."--London Times Literary Supplement

"A fierce, white-hot read."--Booklist

"Titillating...like an artful striptease, The Bride Stripped Bare ensnares us with its rawness."--San Francisco Chronicle

"A jazzy, nonlinear...narrative style as compelling and exotic as the landscape itself."--Baltimore Sun

"Wonderfully sensuous...witty in its construction...a subtle portrait of a modern marriage."--Independent

From the Publisher:

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 a 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, it will make you question whether it is ever entirely possible to know another person.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Publication date: 2005
• ISBN 10: 0060591889
• ISBN 13: 9780060591885
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 371