London Author Nic Penrake Takes Readers On A Dark, Erotic Journey in his Fast Paced Literary Thriller

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The best novel I've ever read by a man writing from a woman's point of view.

London (PRWEB) June 19, 2012

At 38, Luna’s career as a painter takes a sudden dive. The credit crunch is still grinding on and her regular buyers are too busy guarding their second mortgages to invest in modern art. As her financial anxieties escalate, and she digs deeper for new, more ‘commercial’ ideas, she returns to the Pandora’s Box of the past, the sexual and physical abuse she experienced as a child…

…until, one day, she chances upon an idea for a new series of paintings that seems to offer her not just a way out of debt, but a way in to the dark side of her sexuality where nagging questions still remain, demanding answers before she is too advanced in years to have a child of her own.

But at what cost? Her idea is a radical one and upsets her actor boyfriend. She goes for it nonetheless. And in pursuing her ambition, she throws herself into a sexual odyssey with a French swinging couple that brings her to the edge of losing control. Will her daring bear fruit, or end in a triptych of death and disaster?

The first person narrator, Luna, relates with searing honesty her own character failings and how her ambition to create a new and more commercial series of paintings leads to a period of excessive sexual experimentation and, ultimately, a fateful love triangle situation with one of her models and his partner.

“This is a book which, because of its sexual content, s bound to be labelled 'erotica', but it's no more 'erotica' than 'Lady Chatterly's Lover'. It's a domestic drama with the pace of a thriller, it delivers compelling twists and a powerful two-tiered climax. Professional readers have said it would work as the kind of movie the French excel in. And that's probably about right...”

“Unlike a memoir,” says Penrake, “the story is not episodic or anecdotal. The language and pace of ‘Luna’ will appeal to many thriller readers, while the sexual content will appeal to readers who have picked up bestsellers like ‘Belle de Jour’ and erotic literary fiction like Marthe Blau’s ‘Submission’.”

Where 'Prozac Nation' took a long hard look at the effects of addiction to Prozac, "Hi, I'm Luna, I'm A Sex Addict" takes a long hard look at the cause - and effect - of sexual addiction. Is sexual addiction real or just a convenient excuse for selfish behaviour? Is it a symptom of our increasingly diminished attention span, our need for constant instant gratification?

Readers have commented on Luna as a “sympathetic MC”. “Certainly Luna is an unusual narrator,” says Nic Penrake. “To begin with she is a woman of mixed race who was brought up in London until her mother threw out her Iraqi/Persian father when she was 9. She’s come through child abuse, drugs and alcoholism to become a relatively grounded woman, albeit an artist who remains drawn to the worlds of extremes.

“Because of her past we are perhaps more ready to forgive Luna the risky choices she makes. What starts as an art project becomes a sexual adventure, a sort of cathartic journey that enables her to destroy some of the demons of her past even as she inadvertently draws more chaos into her life.

"Luna’s journey is hardly typical of a woman in her late thirties," Penrake says, "and yet the feelings she is made to experience during her story are particularly poignant to any woman of that age and a little older. In this story, sex, murder, miscarriage and birth all mash together to produce a new and hopeful ending which is also a new and hopeful beginning.”

About the Author

Nic Penrake was born in Montreal and has lived in London since the mid 1980s. After 15 years in advertising as a copywriter, he is now devoting more time to working as a writer/director in film. Penrake’s writing has been described as ‘darkly compelling’ and highly insightful of what makes women tick.

Though literary in origin, his noir-like stories focus on his characters’ sexual behaviour and motivation, and strive to peel away social posturing in order to get at the core of what drives us, to understand viscerally what makes for the truest of connections in our increasingly email-saturated lives.

“Hi, I’m Luna, I’m A Sex Addict” by Nic Penrake
Publisher: Melange Books, LLC
Publication Date: May 27, 2012
Novel 236 pages
Price: £9.67 paperback

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