Rosenfeld

Rosenfeld is all intensity and desire - Chicago Review of Books

Primal, graphic and shocking - Esquire

This novel should come with an X rating - The Los Angeles Times

Noa Simon is a thirty-six-year-old filmmaker who knows what she wants when she sees it. When she meets Teddy Rosenfeld, an antagonistic, older CEO, she goes for the jugular. An electrifying encounter in a bathroom stall after their first meeting only serves to whet Noa's appetite, and despite Teddy's subsequent rejections, Noa is empowered by the challenge—and by her own insatiability.

She takes a job at his office and folds herself into his life, where they are just as often at each other's throats as in each other's beds. Their ravenous, volatile romance unearths difficult secrets from both of their pasts, and ultimately forces Noa to reckon with whether she wants to be with Teddy or give herself the permission to become someone more like him.

Rosenfeld is a compulsive, erotic page-turner that refuses to shy away from the thorniest questions of how taboos around power, agency, and control play out between men and women in our most painful and pleasurable moments. With precision and visceral, voyeuristic detail, Maya Kessler has written a tale of sexual initiation and abandon that titillates and interrogates in equal measure.