Edge of Pleasure, The - Softcover

As a small child, Gilver was a precocious talent. At ten, he had worked out the connection between the possession of artistic skill and the granting of sexual favors. By the time he was 28, he was fabulously rich, with the world, especially women, at his feet. Life becomes so accommodating that he forgets to do the very thing that brought him 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, even desperate, to swap his reputation for redemption. The question is, where to find it? In sweet, caring Alice, Gilver might have his answer. But Alice’s best friend Juliette is equally caught up with the painter, and the secrets she holds threaten to destroy him. A dark, observant, elegantly written first novel.

Gilver Memmer is running out of time. A fiercely gifted artist, he is staggeringly good-looking and profoundly self-involved--a cross between every woman's fantasy and every woman’s worst nightmare. His creative genius cannot save him from dissolution, however. No longer the London art scene's wunderkind, as the novel opens he is getting by on the fumes of his former success, sliding inexorably though with self-destructive elegance toward oblivion. Into Gilver's life come two women: one who wants to push him into the grave he has been digging for himself and the other who might just pull him back from the brink.

A Sunday Times (London) Book of the Year

"There is much to enjoy in Stockley's sly, tart mix of sex, painting and mischance, confected with a naughty, sophisticated glitter."--Daily Mail (London)

"Stockley loves all things exotic and stylish and lingers over her nastier characters with relish . . . A vividly sensual novel, packed with colors and scents and textures."--Evening Standard (London)

Praise for A FACTORY OF CUNNING

"Even if you've never fantasized about Jane Austen in leather, you'll get a kick out of A Factory of Cunning . . . The pages of this unscrupulous story are lined with lace, silk and muslin--all of it stitched together in a fabric of shimmering deceit."--The Washington Post Book World

"Deliciously wicked . . . Stockley is such a clever writer that somehow the relevance of her naughty historical novel peeks through."--Chicago Sun-Times

PHILIPPA STOCKLEY is the author of A Factory of Cunning. A deputy editor at the Evening Standard, she lives in London.