Unspoken
Release Date: 29th March
Publisher: Pride Publishing
Give Away
Anyone giving a reaction to this post has a chance of
winning one of my books—a choice of an ebook under all my names.Winners choice. I do need an e-mail address for obvious reasons.
I also write as:
S.Dora for my M/M erotica
&
Ella Laurance for my M/F erotica.
Blurb
Sometimes
a man has to choose between two very different kinds of love. But what if there
is no real choice?
When Stefan meets Adri, it is love at first sight. It
does, however, take some time before he recognizes his own feelings. He’s a
married man—a family man—with a strong sense of responsibility. In Dutch
society of 1935, sex between men over the age of twenty-one might be legal, but
acceptance is still a long way off.
As a working-class man without a steady job, he
doesn’t have the means to ignore society’s rules and create his own little
paradise in which both he and his lover can be together, without his family
having to suffer poverty and shame. Despite all this, the lovers find a way to
carve out moments of intimacy and happiness.
Then the Germans march into Holland and nothing will
ever be the same again. The occupation, which will last five long years, offers
both danger and chances, but choices have to be made—choices of the head and
choices of the heart.
Readers might be interested to know that Stefan, Adri
and others also play a role in The
Bookshop, the story of bookseller Jakoba.
Hidden in plain sight
My novel Unspoken is about a man, Stefan, who
discovers his romantic and sexual attraction to another man out of the blue. He
honestly had no idea it was even possible. He’s married to a total darling of a
woman and they have three children, with a fourth one on its way.
And no, it’s not a friendship slowly growing into
something more, a development not unusual in so-called gay for you stories. I
don’t even consider Stefan as bisexual, though I can understand the confusion. But
Unspoken isn’t about that.
Stefan’s body reacts with almost brutal honesty when he
meets Adri for the very first time. It is as if it recognises the truth of its
owner much sooner while the mind takes a lot longer to recognise what is going
on.
If this would be a temporarily story, it wouldn’t work
to have a gay man this naïve. But what if the story takes place in 1935, in a
Dutch town? What if homosexuality is legal, but that’s practically the only
positive thing that those that are “that way” can hope for? What if Stefan
looks and behaves just like any working class man in a time when homosexual men
are considered not quite masculine by much of the medical establishment? What
if he’s able to perform his marital duties? (I know this doesn’t sound like a
man having fun in bed, and that’s exactly what I mean to say)
Perhaps knowing all that, it’s no longer so hard to
imagine why a man who falls so hard and so deep for another man, has been able
to not even notice his own feelings until they hit him so hard he has no other
choice then to deal with them.
Excerpt
A small
taste?
Even after a year, Stefan could hardly believe he was
able to make another human being this happy simply by existing. The calm
contentment of a marriage between two gentle souls who mean nothing but good
things to each other, but without unrealistic dreams, the gratitude for healthy
children, it had honestly meant something to him.
But then this had happened. Someone had come into his
life, someone with lights in his eyes, who touched whatever he was curious
about or greedy for, with a body that demanded to be touched back, and suddenly
being content to get old and die knowing a good life had been lived was no
longer enough.
About R.A.
In no particular order: woman, writer, in a relationship with my wife since 1981 (though we had to wait until 2001 until we could actually get married), mother of two grown sons, owner of cats (I can pretend, can’t I?), reader and a lot more.
I write in different genres under different names. I’m also S.Dora for my M/M erotica and Ella Laurance for my M/F erotica.
Find R.A. Here
