Hazel's Loves

Written with unflinching honesty, Hazel's Loves is an explicit, intimate novel about midlife sexuality, friendship, motherhood, and the long aftershocks of choices made decades earlier. It contains graphic sexual content as part of an unsentimental portrait of a woman reclaiming her body and her agency.

Hazel is fifty-five, divorced, and no longer willing to pretend that desire has politely packed up and left.

Living alone in 1980s London, Hazel has grown daughters, a familiar job, and an old friendship that knows her too well to be polite. What she hasn't made peace with is how much of herself she set aside - not for love, but to protect her children from the damage of their family falling apart.

When Hazel forms an unexpected relationship, it arrives awkwardly and insistently, unsettling her carefully managed life. The connection becomes intensely sexual and emotionally destabilising, resisting labels and forcing Hazel to confront what she wants now - not what once felt permissible or sensible.

This is a novel for readers who want fiction about women that does not soften the body, tidy the past, or look away from desire - even when it is complicated, inconvenient, and long overdue.