Promiscuous Unbound: A Novel

An injured American woman traces her relationships with men and her broken body as she convalesces in a Paris hospital in this witty debut.

Vivienne Yellow is an American woman who lies in traction in a Parisian hospital, her leg shattered after she was hit by a truck. Through hazy wormholes of memory, colored by her own morphine-stoked sexual longings, we are drawn into her past: Exactly what happened to her as she tried to cross rue de Cherche Midi, her wildly adulterous marriage to an emotionally distant man, and her relationship with her father, the famously charismatic naturalist Maurice Yellow.

Bound to her bed and trapped by her own thoughts, Vivienne’s only link to the outside world is a fellow patient, Sonia, an acid-tongued French teenager with a failing heart. Over the course of her musings, Vivienne comes to understand one thing: sex is her refuge, a notion oddly reaffirmed by the stories Sonia begins to bring her about a new patient, an innocent refugee from the Kosovo crisis who had tried to save herself by marrying the first man she met.

Ribald and funny, with a rich Dorothy Parker bitterness, Promiscuous Unbound traces the relationship between memory and love and loss and reveals each woman’s unorthodox search for salvation.

Praise for Promiscuous Unbound

“A hospital stay and morphine drip after a horrendous accident make for an arresting, erotic reverie in this Canadian author’s first. . . . Relentless in its intimacy, feverish and yet clinical in its examination of love and lust: a gorgeous solitary romance.” —Kirkus Reviews

“A sharply observed novel of family and relationships. . . . Every scene resonates with importance.” —Quill & Quire

© 2023 Atlantic Monthly Press (E-bog): 9781555847760

Release date

E-bog: 22. februar 2023