Unravelling modern woman’s life in seductive story of power. Emily Perkins  tap into contemporary conversations about power, privilege and gender equality  in her fifth novel Lioness, the story of a middle-aged woman in crisis.

Perkin’s narrator Therese Thorne, an attractive woman in her fifties, who has spent the last three decades married to Trevor, a property developer who meets good and great people. Trevor is 70 year-old  and already had four teenage children from his first marriage when they met.  Theresa who had imperfect teeth and no real direction to her life, was helped by Trevor to get her luxury homeware business off the ground. Therese was the homeware designer and bright business woman. Therese relaxed in white shorts at the beach, Therese got that wonky eyetooth straightened so that she could open her mouth when she smiled. She monetised her talent at being a perfect hostess and homemaker. From humbler beginnings Therese has let herself grow used to a life of luxury  after marrying into an empire-building family. But when rumours of corruption gather around her husband’s latest development, the social opprobrium is shocking, the fallout swift, and Therese begins to look at her privileged and insular world with new eyes.

In the flat below Therese, something else is brewing.  Terese is unnerved by Claire, but when Trevor is implicated in corruption scandal the couple’s picture-perfect world  began to shatter. Her neighbour Claire believes she’s discovered the secret of living with freedom and authenticity, freeing herself from the mundanity of domesticity. Therese finds herself enchanted by the lure of the permissive zone Claire creates in her apartment a place of ecstatic release. “Each woman like a storm in a body, a weather system on a leash”  but mostly this is a story of female frustration, and rage.

Therese is not a woman scorned, but rather she is somebody who has spent most of her life internalizing the male gaze.

Lioness by Emily Perkins, Bloomsbury £16.99, 288 pages