Gordon: A Novel

Louisa is a clever, self-reliant woman who has just been discharged from her duty as an officer in the British Army during World War II. In a London pub one afternoon she meets Gordon: a slight, peculiar psychiatrist with queer eyes and a strange charisma. Within an hour, Louisa has been sexually conquered by him on a garden bench. So begins an affair in which Gordon compulsively violates Louisa’s body and psyche, while Louisa matches his onslaughts with an insolent submission. As their entanglement deepens, Louisa finds a heady emotional satisfaction beneath the humiliation that Gordon inflicts, and comes to a new understanding of her troubled history and the self that has emerged from it.

Originally published under a pseudonym in 1966, Gordon was banned in England and Germany for its frank sexual content, and even today it remains provocative in its fearless probing of the boundaries of consent and submission.