"The Fifth Floor Society: An Awakening in Lisbon"

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Vivienne Cross came to Lisbon to restore a tile panel. She had not planned on restoring herself. At thirty-two, she is precise, controlled, and professionally fearless. A woman who has built her career on uncovering what others have buried. She is exceptionally good at reading surfaces. She had never once thought to apply that same patience to herself. Then she finds it: hidden under two centuries of overpainting, an erotic panel of extraordinary beauty, bodies entwined in azulejo blue and white, desire captured in ceramic. The figures are unmistakable. So is what Vivienne feels looking at them. A heat she recognizes, a longing she has spent thirty-two years carefully painting over, including the parts that have always turned, with a particular urgency, toward women. The panel changes something within her and it is a colleague who notices. A quiet suggestion from someone who has known her long enough to see what she might finally be ready for. The door is unremarkable, set into a wall of faded tiles in the Alfama, the kind you walk past a dozen times without noticing. Behind it is the Fifth Floor Society. The Society's Lisbon chapter was founded in 1793 by a wealthy noblewoman who believed the body was not a source of sin but a source of knowledge. It is not the only one. Across Portugal, in cities old enough to keep secrets, the Society has operated ever since. Each chapter is distinct, each founded by its own hand, all devoted, with absolute discretion, to desire. To discovering what you truly want. And what it costs to finally have it. Vivienne tells herself she is going out of professional curiosity. She tells herself this more than once. An Awakening in Lisbon is the story of what happens when a woman who has spent her life as the overpainting finally meets the original beneath. A novel of art and longing, of Lisbon's cobbled hills and candlelit rooms, of the particular terror of being truly seen, and the far greater terror of seeing yourself clearly for the first time. Sensual, atmospheric, and deeply felt. Literary erotica for readers who want their desire served with intelligence and their pleasure earned with prose.