Virgin Next Door

Kelly Piper is twenty-one, home from university for the summer, and already bored of her own bedroom.Her dad is at work from six till dark and sometimes later. Her mum is in Nottingham now with a boyfriend called Steve. The fridge is empty. The friends are scattered. Three months of nothing stretch out in front of her and she's standing at her bedroom window in a vest and cut-off shorts wondering how she's going to fill them.And then she sees the woman in the garden next door.Amanda Webster. Thirty-eight. Dark hair, pale green silk robe, bare feet on warm paving stones, a watering can in one hand and a knowing smile on her face when she looks up and catches Kelly watching. Kelly has met her once, years ago, at Christmas, over the fence. She doesn't remember her looking like this.The next morning Kelly runs out of coffee.Amanda has coffee.The Virgin Next Door is a slow, warm, deeply filthy summer story about a girl who thought she was straight, a marriage that hasn't been a marriage in years, and the long golden weeks between two back gardens where a twenty-one-year-old finds out that everything she ever told herself about her own body was a lie. About borrowed coffee. About a red bikini worn for the first time by a pool she wasn't meant to be in. About a hand that reaches a little too naturally across a kitchen island. About the woman who has done this before, who knows exactly what she's doing, and who has decided, very calmly, that Kelly Piper is worth taking her time over.It is a first-time story. It is an age-gap story. It is a story about being wanted properly for the first time in your life, by someone who has absolutely no intention of being kind about it.Two gardens. One low fence. One gate that's always propped open.Kelly keeps telling herself she's being ridiculous.She isn't.A sapphic summer for grown-ups. Warm, slow, wicked, and impossible to put down.