The Seduction: A Novel - Softcover

Torres, Sara

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1668092980 ISBN 13: 9781668092989

Publisher: Atria/Primero Sueno Press, 2026

Synopsis

Unspoken tensions simmer between two women under the heat of a Catalan summer in this internationally bestselling, erotic, and quietly radical portrait of queer desire.

In a sun-drenched house on the Catalan coast, a young, queer photographer arrives to capture the portrait of a celebrated writer. But what begins as a professional collaboration slowly unravels into something more intimate and unsettling—a charged exchange of glances, silence, and shifting emotional boundaries.

The photographer, unnamed and quietly observant, is drawn to the writer’s enigmatic presence, her self-possession, her power. Over shared meals and quiet routines, the difficulty of understanding the desire of the other begins to obsess the narrator. As the summer heat thickens, so too does the unspoken tension between them, heightening the photographer’s insecurities and her perception of her own flaws. When a third woman arrives, an old friend with blurred boundaries, the fragile connection begins to unravel. Is this seduction, or projection? Intimacy, or illusion?

Told through lyrical, introspective prose, The Seduction is a poetic, slow-burn exploration of the complexities of seduction between women, intimacy, queer longing, and the quiet ache of unfulfilled connections.

About this title

About the Author

Sara Torres is a Spanish poet and novelist. In 2014, she won the Gloria Fuertes Poetry Prize. For her first novel, Lo que hay (X Is Where I Am), she received the Javier Morote Prize, awarded by the Spanish Confederation of Booksellers’ Guilds and Associations for the best new author in 2022. She holds a PhD, specializing in theories of lesbian queer desire and fetish.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1 1.
My history of desire is basically a history of failure, everything I wanted and couldn’t have, all the times I trembled in the distance that separated me from the object of my affection.

We don’t sit across from each other in car number three of the train leaving the Estació de França on its way to the beach house. Our bodies are sitting at a diagonal. We avoid an intimacy that could easily be shared with a stranger. She sits by the window, traveling backward. I am on the other side of the table, with one foot escaping toward the gray floor of the aisle.

If touching her were possible, I would know what to do. I would know exactly what to do.

In songs, it’s never a woman boasting about being able to rock another woman’s body, leaving her shocked and trembling. But I know what I’m capable of. What’s the point of false humility or innocence? My claim isn’t born of arrogance or some lust for power. It’s just fair.

There’s an empty seat beside her thigh, where she rests the bag with her laptop and some books she never starts reading. I observe her. She surveys the landscape. A succession of white houses and pine trees. Dry earth and the tall plumes of my favorite plant ever since I was a girl, pampas grass: a proud, resilient species that makes roadsides more beautiful and is stigmatized with the label “invasive.”

Now I pretend to also be enjoying the landscape. What seems relevant to her doesn’t matter to me, and my slight nervousness won’t let me hide it. My eyes return to her body with raw curiosity. I see a white knit vest with a V-neck, her bare shoulders peeking out. Moles and pale spots travel down her arm until they find the scar, a puncture mark on her skin, the small irruption of a vaccine that indicates a generational gap. I grew up looking at my mother’s. I don’t have one.

I’ve come this far, drawn by a photograph on the cover of a book titled Pleasure and Time. In that portrait, a woman who was not yet herself seemed absent as the camera chose her among all other things. She was its focus, behind her the vague branches of a bush and the last afternoon light on… the sea? The composition was of shadows, her hair falling on her shoulders and back. Her face in profile, with raised forehead and lightly pursed lips—a serious expression, firm and relaxed at the same time. Barely a lick of light touching her temple, the line of her nose, mouth, chin.

On the new release table at a bookstore in the Raval neighborhood, a portrait taken at dusk of a body perhaps sleepy from the sun and sea or, who knows, maybe happy after a day at the beach that stretched out into the night. Into the night because the desire in the gaze of the one taking the photograph is evident, vivid. That was what lured me in: understanding the gaze that portrays a face yet urgently captures something going on a bit farther down, in her torso covered by a white short-sleeved T-shirt. Its folds revealing every interaction of the fabric with the flesh beneath.

Those were perhaps the final hours of a summer night, sticky with salt and slightly colder. Pleasure and time, the curve of her bare breast and darker nipple brushing the cloth, its tautness creating waves. I thought that, if it were possible for me to touch that body, I would know what to do; I would know exactly what to do.

And I took the portrait with the novel attached to it. I brought it to my room; I looked at it for several days before deciding to read it. The text was secondary.

Once I was told there was something in the movement of my pupils, capricious and independent of each other, that made my gaze different from the way eyes are supposed to focus on the world. Now, when I find the same trait in her—honey-colored eyes slanting downward, inquisitive and sad, losing their symmetry—I feel I understand, for the first time, the power of a different gaze.

She doesn’t direct it toward me during most of the trip. Is she avoiding me? Is she observing me out of the corner of her eye, not facing me, so she won’t have to start a conversation? Her interest flees toward the window, toward the monotonous passage of alternating fields of crops and small solitary homes. On the surface of the glass, I see her reflection—chestnut-brown hair falling in waves onto her narrow shoulders, her thin arms resting on her knees. Every once in a while, as if in conflict with a thought, she furrows her mouth in a small spasm or tightens her right hand that holds the leash.

She still hasn’t spoken its name. When she notified me she’d be coming, she wrote: My dog will come with us, too; she loves the sand and playing amid the tall grasses around the house. She doesn’t let strangers touch her. Was I the stranger?

Swaying with the train’s clatter, the animal rests its head on a cloth fish it sometimes licks ceremoniously, as if to calm itself. At one point it picks the toy up in its mouth and tosses it toward the aisle. My travel companion lengthens one long arm over the empty seat and, since she still can’t reach it, extends her entire body, folding at the waist, and finally rescues the saliva-damp cloth with the tips of her fingers.

I could take her photograph now. In a way, I am, but the image won’t remain intact in my mind. I don’t know when there’ll be sufficient intimacy for me to be able to pull out my camera and place it between us. A lens to advance into her space. To intercede. Despite the attitude that imposes a distance, there are barely a few centimeters separating her legs from mine. If I took a photo now, it would almost be violent.

Nevertheless, she had said: You can take photographs; it’s a good location. She spoke of the light at seven in the evening. All this to formalize an invitation in reply to an email of mine asking if I could photograph her in the home where she would write her next novel. My project was a collective book of portraits of female authors and artists working. She accepted tersely and then didn’t bring up the subject again. In our later communication, she talked a lot about the house, about its various rooms and what she referred to as the principles of coexistence, a series of notes about plans for mornings and evenings, according to the sun’s rhythm. When she saw me arrive at the station loaded down, she pointed quizzically at the black bag I carried in addition to my suitcase. “This is my camera…” I said optimistically, as if that were something we both wanted. She didn’t respond. She turned away. She lifted her shoulder bag a few centimeters above her low-heeled shoes and shortened the dog’s leash as she headed to the open door of car number three. I walked behind them, like a girl, without being one, or only just a little.

There’s nothing special about the Altafulla station. The train stops as if in a void between two more popular destinations. She points to the top part of a metal fence, where there’s a sign with a phone number below the word TAXI.

“We won’t call. They won’t come. Tourism. Is your suitcase very heavy? Even if they did pick up the phone, we’d have to wait too long. And this isn’t a pleasant place to wait.”

My suitcase is pretty heavy. I vigorously shake my head no.

I lie twice. No. No.

Later I’ll have to bear the excessive weight of baggage planned for an indefinite period of time, with inexact plans.

Thursday, six thirty in the evening. September. Uphill, dampness and heat in a cloudy sky. Across the road, a bright-red house with a farm-type fence in the same color. Pizzeria La Trattoria. Closed doors, empty outdoor seating, and a menu at the entrance with all the prices crossed out in pen. Two stone lions with open mouths in the garden.

“We’re fifteen minutes away.”

We pass several streets of stone houses, some with brick arches surrounding large wooden doors. We stop for a second in front of one with a tiny store on the street level. There is a sign with an outline of a witch that reads PASTISSERIA ÀNGELS. She hesitates, wishes the baker a good afternoon. She says, “I’m thinking it’d be better if I come back tomorrow morning first thing.”

This woman lives in this place. As well as on the cover of the book that spent so many days on my bedside table. Now I walk beside her. I wish someone would see me and remember us some years later.

Edition details

• Publisher: Atria/Primero Sueno Press
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1668092980
• ISBN 13: 9781668092989
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 176