The Book of Revelation

"He felt them begin to touch him. Sometimes their hands were tender, sometimes they were only curious, but there was no part of him, no curve or hollow, that they did not, in the end, explore."


On a bright spring day in Amsterdam, a young man steps out of his studio to buy a pack of cigarettes. A dancer and choreographer, he would seem to have made the life of his choice: an international reputation; an exquisite French girlfriend, from whom he's been inseparable for seven years; careful plans for an interesting future, with no regrets lingering in his past. Moreover,  he is charismatic and physically beautiful.


Then, passing through a dark alley, he is accosted by three cloaked and hooded women -- fans, he briefly thinks -- who drug and then hold him their sexual prisoner. Their motivations remain to him as mysterious as the story of his abduction seems unbelievable, even laughable, to those in whom he later confides his plight and shame. Those eighteen days of bizarre captivity, and the subsequent years of his life, make The Book of Revelation a wildly compelling and deeply disturbing account of the most forbidding aspects of the human psyche.

Rupert Thomson is the author of five previous novels -- of which Soft!, The Insult, Air & Fire, and The Five Gates of Hell are available in Vintage paperback. He lives in London.