SOME are touting it as the next Fifty Shades of Grey, while others say it is the feminist riposte to the EL James S&M potboiler. Whatever the case, prepare for months of hype as Maestra hits the bookshops this week.
With PR machines in overdrive, the book will to be almost as hard to avoid as Fifty Shades. The tag-line “The most shocking thriller you’ll read this year” is already emblazoned on the sides of lorries and on billboards across the country.
Maestra will be published in over thirty different territories. Glamour Magazine has asked, “Is Maestra the smart Fifty Shades of Grey we’ve been waiting for?” Even in the Netherlands, a De Telegraaf article has proposed it to be “De Sexier Fifty Shades of Grey”.
Author, Lisa Hilton, though does not herself see her book as anything like Fifty Shades. “Its been described as a sex book,” she says, “but there aren’t that many sex scenes in it. All I wanted to do was to write about sex in what seems to be an adult and honest way. I’m describing the things that grown-ups do with the words that grown-ups use.”
In fact, while Fifty Shades was a sexual romance, Maestra is more a sex-laden crime thriller, different to most other books in middle-market women’s erotica. At times it seems to be the antithesis of Fifty Shades, delivering a heroine who enjoys sex and is uninhibited and unashamed. Judith Rashleigh, is no timid, virginal Anastasia Steele, but a sociopath who loves adventurous sex and sex parties.
But before Maestra was bought by the relatively small publishing house Bonnier Zaffre, Hilton had started to feel it was the book she would never be able to sell. She recalls that when she first tried to get it published the reaction from several male editors and agents was that the sex scenes were too graphic. Then, at last year’s London Book Fair she had a meeting with a book publisher who told her that she was going to have to tone down the sex scenes because they were too filthy. Hilton was shocked as the company the publisher worked for had printed American Psycho - which involves some of the most shocking sexual violence ever written. “I couldn’t understand why that would be acceptable and a woman cheerfully enjoying a threesome would be seen as filthy.”
One of the complaints about Fifty Shades, by feminist and domestic abuse campaigners, was that it glorified violence against women and popularised a relationship built on power and control. That’s not the problem with Maestra. Rather, it seems, the problem for some is that its heroine is far from victim, but, rather, a bit of a predator.
“I was trying,” she says, “to write a character which I thought of as modern. And this idea of women being shrinking violets is terribly out of date. I don’t use Tinder [the dating app] myself but I’ve seen it. I’ve seen the kind of stuff that teenagers routinely exchange between themselves. In order to write a believable and realistic character it would be necessary to absorb that fairly seismic shift.”
Hilton insists that the book is not a "feminist polemic", nor was it her intention to be the "next EL James".
Since the success of Fifty Shades Of Grey, which, in 2012, became the best selling book of all time, the women’s erotica market has boomed. Almost every few months there is talk of the “next EL James”. In America, for instance, Audrey Carlan’s Calendar Girl, which features a young woman working for an escort agency. Or here in Scotland, in the form of Samantha Young’s On Dublin Street.
Meanwhile, fans of women’s erotica don’t like to see their favourite genre defined by one book. Popular sex blogger Cara Sutra says: “It’s a little disheartening that so many erotic titles are now compared to Fifty Shades of Grey, as if it were the first erotic book the world has seen. Both erotica and kink have been around a lot longer than Fifty Shades of Grey – and so has the adventurous and explorative nature of female sexuality.”
It’s far from certain the same type of readers will go for Maestra in the way they went for Fifty Shades. The EL James trilogy appealed to a readership which enjoyed traditional romance, and was described as “mummy porn”, and Maestra is certainly not that. Nevertheless, with movie rights sold and two more volumes of a trilogy to come, there will be no avoiding either the book or comparisons to EL James.
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