Monsieur

Book excerpt: What sort of woman has a taste for middle-aged, married men? Ellie, twenty years old and living in Paris, leads a light and carefree life until she meets “Mister”—a married surgeon approaching middle age. Beginning with their frenzied affair in a hotel room in the fifteenth arrondissement, Monsieur details the clandestine Tuesday morning hotel meetings and fleeting phone calls spanning several months of sexual adventure. Generous with her body and never lacking erotic imagination (or partners—men and women), Ellie illuminates her deviations in a lucid, ferocious, and passionate tale. Often shocking but never gratuitous, Monsieur is, paradoxically, a coming-of-age story—her seduction of the married man and its devastating aftermath leaving Ellie older and wiser than she once was after their four-month affair comes to its unpredictable conclusion. At once a novel-confession and a description of the descent from passion to cruel fantasy, this is the disenchantment of a contemporary Lolita.