Beautiful English au pair, Selene Ormond, has found her perfect match in reserved CPA Davis Beckwith (DB)—a rising star in his family’s accounting firm. Their sexual kinks appear to fit together like puzzle pieces. The only clouds on the horizon are DB’s controlling mother, and Selene’s rather careless sexual past involving a group of posh ex-pats from her schooldays in Britain. Things come to a head when photos from one of Selene’s escapades comes to light, threatening her place in DB’s straightlaced, old-money family. Selene’s gap-year romance turns serious, but her adventurous sexuality threatens to catch up with her.
LIPS is a contemporary Shakespearean love-affair set in a quiet, Midwestern college town, the shoreline estates of Lake Michigan, and the glass towers of Chicago. Written in a deceptively subdued prose style, LIPS traces the relationship of two sexually compromised people and exposes the tangle of lies necessary to bind both lovers and families together. A cast of eccentric characters from both sides of the Atlantic add spice to the mix as Selene and DB struggle to forge a lasting love in the face of odds stacked against them.
Advance Praise for Seren
“A page-turning thriller, a meditation on art, and a touching exploration of second chances, Peter Gooch’s SEREN is a novel that does all that.”
—Adam Prince
“The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men”
—Adam Prince
“The Beautiful Wishes of Ugly Men”
“In this arresting novel, Peter Gooch uses his impressive talents as a writer and painter to craft a gripping mystery centered on a masterpiece by landscape painter Norris Bainbridge. . . . Gooch’s hand with narrative and description is sure, and his knowledge of the milieu and characters carries the story along with satirical panache and absorbing suspense. Seren is at once a sharply comic satire of the art scene, a canny meditation on the nature of art, and an entirely absorbing murder mystery. Buy it. Read it. Enjoy.”
—Arnold Johnston, novelist, playwright, poet, and author of
Swept Away, The Witching Voice, and Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been
—Arnold Johnston, novelist, playwright, poet, and author of Swept Away, The Witching Voice, and Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been
“Peter Gooch’s Seren is above all a good read, suspenseful, comic, and diverting. Drawing on his own career as a fine visual artist, Gooch constructs a puzzle centered on the life and death of a renowned and reclusive painter, Norris Bainbridge, the key to whose demise is Seren, his beautiful and enigmatic muse. This novel skewers the pretensions and infighting of the art world in the context of a thoroughly satisfying mystery that will make readers laugh and think.”
—Deborah Ann Percy, fiction writer, playwright, and author of
Invisible Traffic and Dream Time (Susan Smith Blackburn Award Finalist)
—Deborah Ann Percy, fiction writer, playwright, and author of Invisible Traffic and Dream Time (Susan Smith Blackburn Award Finalist)
“Seren is a tour de force that dives into an artist’s deepest desires—a glimpse of immortality, or his signature on the ceiling of the local bar beside other renowned artists. Peter Gooch offers a cast of lively, well-rounded characters in an affluent artists’ world. The plot line quivers with energy and mystery as Fairchild Moss, a competent Midwest artist/art dealer, renews his singular talent for painting. Rooted in an archetypal battle between darkness and light, Moss is possessed by traces of the elusive and feral Seren, an artist’s model. It appears that she has circled the death of three artists who displayed with their last brushstrokes across the broad canvas of life a luminous splash of creation. Is she the muse his vision requires, or is she nature’s duende? Will a perfect fit with Seren’s lithe body produce a work of genius? Or will the artist sell his soul in a Faustian bargain for his signature on the ceiling?”
—Phaedra Greenwood, author of
Beside the Rio Hondo and co-author of Those Were the Days: Life and love in 1970s New Mexico.
—Phaedra Greenwood, author of Beside the Rio Hondo and co-author of Those Were the Days: Life and love in 1970s New Mexico.