Rosenfeld

The internationally bestselling, brazenly sexy, and scathingly candid novel about a white-hot relationship built on scorched earth and the two intractable characters who emerge from it transformed.

I lean over the table, reaching for Teddy’s pack of cigarettes. “Pass one.” My hand doesn’t reach.
“Whatever you want.” His eyes are on me.
I look at him and say in absolute seriousness,“You be careful now.”

Noa Simon is a thirty-six-year-old filmmaker who knows what she wants when she sees it, and 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.