Sting

Samantha has been sent by her editor to get an exclusive on the reclusive author of Sting, the bestselling novel that the whole world believes was written by a man. She has faked her resignation, signed an NDA, and arrived wearing exactly what the advertisement specified: pleated skirt, white blouse, white cotton bra and knickers, plain buckled shoes. She is thirty and looks eighteen in this outfit and she knows it and arrived knowing it.

Sting is a standalone novel following Samantha from that first afternoon in PR’s office through the full arc of her time at the Victorian house, which turns out to be considerably longer and considerably more transformative than the assignment she accepted. The book she has come to research is a prequel to the bestseller, covering a young woman’s life from eighteen to twenty-eight, and PR wants Samantha to live it, scene by scene, acting out each chapter so that the writing comes from something real. Samantha is twenty-eight. She has, it turns out, been preparing for this without knowing it.

Paula Mann writes this with the ambition of a novel rather than a series, and the scale earns it. Samantha is a fully realised character, sharp and self-aware and capable of the specific honesty that a narrative of this kind requires, someone whose journalism has given her the ability to observe herself from the outside even while the inside of her is doing things she did not entirely plan. PR is the dominant that the genre rarely produces: patient, intelligent, genuinely interested in the quality of the writing as much as in the quality of the submission, and possessed of the long view that comes from having written one book about desire and knowing exactly what the next one requires.

The spanking and the sex are explicit and fully described throughout, every implement named and felt, the arousal tracked across months rather than evenings. The tenderness and the discipline arrive together throughout, because in this house they have always been the same thing.

This book contains explicit F/F erotic spanking, bare bottom correction, hand spanking, cane, tawse and paddle use, authority and employment dynamics, extended power exchange relationship, full nudity, and graphic sexual content between consenting adult women.