The Edge of Pleasure - Tapa blanda

'On his forty-second birthday, Gilver Memmer woke up and realised he had slept for over ten years.' As a small child, Gilver is a precocious talent. At ten, he has worked out the connection between the possession of artistic skill and the granting of sexual favours. By the time he is twenty-eight he is fabulously rich, with the world, especially women, at his feet. Life becomes so accommodating that he forgets to bother doing the thing that brought him his fame. Year after year it seems to make no difference to his success. Then within the space of a few short weeks, his money dries up, his house burns down and drink becomes his new best friend. Suddenly Gilver is ready and desperate to swap his reputation for redemption. The question is where to find it? In sweet, caring, besotted Alice, Gilver might have his answer. But Alice's best friend Juliette is equally caught up in the painter, and the dark secret she holds threatens to destroy him...Reminiscent of a young Beryl Bainbridge or Muriel Spark, The Edge of Pleasure is a stylish first novel from a wonderful writing talent.

Having had her first novel rejected by Faber when she was eight, Philippa Stockley worked variously and often simultaneously as a painter; a clothing-, set-, costume-, interior- and graphic-designer; a window-painter; journalist; newspaper-page-designer; editor, columnist and reviewer, before publishing her first London-set novel, The Edge of Pleasure. She studied English at Oxford, then clothing history at the Courtauld Institute where she wrote a thesis upon costume in the novels of Fielding and Defoe, giving her an introduction to the background of her second novel, The Factory of Cunning. Philippa Stockley has reviewed for The Sunday Telegraph and Country Life, and written for The Evening Standard, RA magazine, and Cornerstone.