With My Body

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What to expect

In 2003 Nikki Gemmell created a sensation when, writing under the tag ‘Anonymous’, her novel The Bride Stripped Bare became a literary phenomenon, with its raw and unflinching depiction of female sexuality.

Now, eight years later, Gemmell returns with another tour de force, With My Body, and addresses the question of what is intimacy and whether it is ever truly possible to know another person. It is at once a manifesto of married mothers everywhere and a highly personal story of one woman’s sexual awakening.

A wife, comfortably married and with three children, is contemplating middle age along with all the constraints of motherhood. Finding herself numb and locked down in an unending cycle of school runs, laundry and meal times, she cannot at first see a way to live with honesty. Even her husband, whom she loves, has never reached the core of her. Despairing of ever finding a way through her family to her own identity, she returns to the the memory of an old love affair – the consequences of which she has never resolved. She goes back to her past and confronts it, and the result is an exhilarating examination of present-day desire.

With My Body is exquisitely raw, emotional and bold.

Critics Review

  • Praise for ‘The Bride Stripped Bare’:

    ‘Starkly explicit…richly descriptive with a fast-paced narrative’ Sunday Telegraph

    ‘Nikki Gemmel’s prose has a wonderful sensuousness…witty…a subtle portrait of a modern and rather alienating marriage’ Lisa Appignanesi, Independent Magazine

    ‘Must read…A tale of sexual awakening for the dark horse in all of us’ Tatler

    ‘The sex is well-written…Gemmell is refreshingly straightforward about the act’ Melanie McGrath, Evening Standard

    ‘Easy to read, hard to put down. Keep an extinguisher handy’ Closer

    ‘A page-turner’ Evening Standard

    ‘A bored housewife embarks on a life of sexual pleasure…The sex is rude and raunchy and “exactly where you want it”‘ Elle

    ‘Personal dilemmas are bravely explored; thoughts and fantasies about sex and infidelity, which most women have learned to keep to themselves, are laid bare on the page in all their shocking glory…brutal, brilliant and addictive’ Glasgow Herald

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