Dear Prudence: Playing for Keeps

Dear Prudence, won't you come out to play? In this raw, literary erotic novel, a dance instructor who has spent years teaching others to feel their own bodies meets a man who has spent a lifetime learning not to feel his. Arthur is a guitar maker with over ten years of therapy behind him, a recent breakup, and a deep fear of being truly seen. Prudence is warm, direct, and exhausted by men who run. When their first kiss sends him into a giddy spiral of morning-after texts and hour-long drives, she thinks she's finally found someone who can meet her. Then he pulls away. He retreats. He sabotages the connection just when it matters most. And when she calls him on it, he freezes. Told in alternating first-person voices—hers wry and fierce, his halting and painfully literal— Dear Prudence follows two people through the rupture and the slow, uncertain work of repair. No easy resolutions. Just the messy, erotic, transformative courage of choosing each other after everything has fallen apart. For readers who believe that healing is not linear, that desire can be a map, and that sometimes the most radical act is simply staying. Read more