When Hillary & her girlfriends rent a country house for their summer vacation, it is a pleasant surprise to find that its secretive & kinky owner, Darius Harwood, seems to be the most desirable man in the locale. That is, before Hillary meets Haldane, the blond & beautifully proportioned Norwegian sailor who works nearby. Intrigued by the sexual allure of two very different men, Hillary can ...

This is exactly what happens to the usually conventional Alexa Lavelle after a minor head injury whilst holidaying in the Caribbean. & in order to satisfy her strange & voluptuous new appetites, she is compelled to seek the enigmatic & sophistacated doctors at an exclusive medical practice in London.
Their specialist knowledge of psycho-sexual medicine takes Alexa into a wolrd of bizarre fetishism & erotic indulgence. & one particularly attractive doctor has concocted a plan which will prove to be the ultimate test of her senses, & to unleash the devil inside.
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Tokyo, 1990

Grey Hutchins is in pursuit of an obsession. She is searching for a piece of film taken during the infamous

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Ophelia Reid is an incomparable beauty with an incorrigible nature. Having purposefully wrecked her carefully arranged marriage to an utterly suitable marquis, she flees to London, determined to choose her own wealthy husb&. On the journey there, she meets Raphael Locke, the most desired young lord in Engl&.

Raphael is determined to prove to his friends that Ophelia is more than just a vacuous beauty & whisks her off to his country estate. But as the days pass, & Ophelia

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'I was nearly twenty before I understood that there was a name for what sometimes happened to me. Later, I learned that it has gone by many names
- the black dog, the bell jar, the noonday demon, darkness visible, malignant sadness
- but in my teens I'd just assumed that my fierce highs & days of disproportionate, isolating despair were part of every teenager's repertoire
- how else would Morrissey have sold so many records? These pitches in mood were something I didn't speak about to anyone, because I was afraid of two things
- either that it was nothing serious, & I would be told to pull myself together, or that it was serious, & I would be told that, yes, I was a mental case.'

Stephanie Merritt has a career as a novelist & journalist, a beautiful son & a supportive family. Why then did she want to kill herself at the age of 29? Why could no one, neither the system of GPs & health professionals, nor her closest family & friends help her?

Reading like a hybrid of Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation and Rachel Cusk's more sober A Life's Work, Stephanie's unflinchingly honest memoir explores areas of experience commonly associated with depression such as love, solitude & self-medication through the prism of her own experience.

Beautifully written & intensely honest this is an extraordinarily moving, life-affirming book about a debilitating illness that affects one in six people in the UK alone.









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' Whichever option I choose, men are going to die.'

This is the Devil's Alternative, the appalling choice facing

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