Book Description

MORE THAN 4500 COPIES DOWNLOADED BY AMAZON READERS IN TWO DAYS...THE PRICE OF HANNAH BLAKE is in the tantalizing tradition of the Victorian underground erotic novel, but with the pace and suspense of a contemporary thriller, as Hannah Blake fights for survival in Victorian England's bizarre “Duke's Troupe” of dancers and actors.You fall in love with Hannah's beauty, courage in the face of unimaginable abuse, and determination to assert her own awakening passion—and love—in the duke's prison of luxury and license.You are swept along as the unspoiled farm girl from Devon is torn from her family, stripped and appraised by her ruthless instructors, forcibly “initiated” into the cruel erotic games of the young men and women of the troupe—and fights to survive and preserve her deepest values. It is romantic suspense that seizes you and draws you forward ever faster as Hannah falls in love with the man who will risk everything to save her from enslavement to the duke and his consorts--a fate no one ever has escaped.Here is a bitter and beautiful recreation of the Age of Victoria, a period that has become synonymous with modesty and sexual repression, but which concealed a frenzy of secret lust, twisted sexuality, and cruelty.Striding through these pages, as the peril of young Hannah Blake and her daring lover mounts, are historic figures such as the great reformer Prime Minister William Gladstone, his First Lord of the Admiralty, Sherlock Holmes and the malevolent Professor Moriarty--and the prostitutes, sailors, lords and ladies, courtiers, and often desperately poor English country folk who gave the age its color and character.Bringing them all together is the unbreakable spirit of Hannah, a prisoner of corruption and lust who awakens to a yearning passion—and love—few in the repressed and rigid age of Victoria could imagine.Walter Donway has taken elements of Victorian erotica, the contemporary thriller, and the historical novel and--in the white-hot furnace of THE PRICE OF HANNAH BLAKE--forged something greater: a genuine Romantic novel.THE PRICE OF HANNAH BLAKE is about nothing less than the battle for salvation of womanhood and its dearest desires. WALTER DONWAY is a professional writer and editor whose four novels serialized on the Web site Literotica that have been read and praised by tens of thousands of readers. His other work includes widely admired poetry; articles on topics from brain science and health-care policy to psychology and the arts; online publications on topics from investment and finance to international politics. He started the quarterly journal, Cerebrum: The Dana Forum on Brain Science, and edited it for eight years. His book of poetry, Touched By Its Rays, was hailed as reasserting the great tradition in poetry that is magical to the ear, accessible to read, and always emotionally rewarding.THE PRICE OF HANNAH BLAKE, published by Romantic Revolution Books, is his first novel published as an Amazon Select book.Mr. Donway makes his home in New York City and East Hampton, Long Island, with his wife, Robin.