At the heart of this panoramic, multidimensional narrative is the compelling struggle of a young woman to lift her body and soul out of the gutter. Faber leads us back to 1870s London, where Sugar, a nineteen-year-old whore in the brothel of the terrifying Mrs. Castaway, yearns for escape to a better life. Her ascent through the strata of Victorian society offers us intimacy with a host of lovable, maddening, unforgettable characters. They begin with...

On the eve of his ninetieth birthday, a bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin. As is his habit—he has purchased hundreds of women—he asks a madam for her assistance. The fourteen-year-old girl who is procured for him is enchanting, but exhausted as she is from caring for siblings and her job sewing buttons, she can do little but sleep. Yet with this sleeping beauty at his side, it is he who awakens to a romance

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A tale inspired by the final days of literary master Stephen Crane is set in the underworld of turn-of-the-century New York and follows his death-bed dictation of his final novel, "The Painted Boy," while biding farewell to a long-time love.

A sweeping historical tale, based on the life and times of the daughter of a New York merchant, finds the orphaned Belle suffering at the hands of a rival cousin, before working as a prostitute and transforming herself repeatedly to win the love and life she desires.

As he sits by his dying mother, a son immerses himself in his memories of his childhood and youth while he investigates the complex relationship with his mother, his own children and his country, Mexico.

On a frosty January day in Bergen, Norway, private investigator Varg Veum is visited by a prostitute. Her friend Margrethe has disappeared and hasn't been seen for days. Before her disappearance, something had unsettled her: she'd turned away a customer and returned to the neighbourhood in terror. Shortly after taking the case, Veum is confronted with a brutal, uneasy reality. He soon finds the first body--and it won't be the last. His investigation...

Forming a partnership with a prostitute, a down-on-his-luck con man recklessly agrees to a friend's request to orchestrate a theft in a Los Angeles apartment, where a crew of soldiers is reputed to have stashed millions in cash smuggled out of Afghanistan. Rumor has it that two million dollars in army money was smuggled out of Afghanistan and is stashed in an apartment in Los Angeles. Rowan Petty, a conman down on his luck, heads south with his sweet-talking...

"It's 1954 on far-flung Verona Island, a tropical paradise with a fragile economy and a rising crime rate. Prostitution is legal and Lila Gulliver is proud of her business, a high-end brothel where her clients are guaranteed privacy and discretion. When Carità Bercy, a young, destitute, and beautiful blind woman arrives at her door seeking employment, Lila decides to give her a chance. Carità proves a valuable asset to the house, as well as a psychological...

"The English-language debut of Indonesia's greatest young novelist, Eka Kurniawan: "without a doubt the most original, imaginatively profound, and elegant writer of fiction in Indonesia today: its brightest and most unexpected meteorite" (Benedict Anderson). One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years. So begins Beauty Is a Wound, an epic, sweeping, compulsively readable novel, combining history,...

"Debut novel in which a woman's search for her missing sister leads her into the world of contemporary sex work. Rona Leonard was only twenty-years-old when she walked out of her sister Fiona's flat and disappeared. Six years later--worn down by a tedious job, childcare, and an aching absence in her life--Fiona's mundane existence is blown apart by the revelation that Rona had been working as a prostitute before she vanished. Driven to discover the...