Lisa Taddeo eavesdrop into the sexual, emotional lives of three ordinary American women, from very different backgrounds and regions of the United States, whose lives shaped by their desires and power with strange, often shattering  results going between enticing fantasy and cruel reality. “She smiles as her hand hovers around the golden button of his jeans, he growls, she had never heard a man actually do that  in real life before”. “Oh you are seducing me” he says,

All Lina waned to be desired how did she end up in a marriage with two children and a husband who wouldn’t touch her?

All Maggie wanted was to be understood. How did she end up in a relationship with her teacher and then in court, a hated pariah in her small town?

All Sloane wanted was to be admired. How did she end up a sexual object of men, including her husband, who like to watch her have sex with other men and women?

Three Women is about unmet needs, unspoken thoughts, disappointments, hopes and unrelenting obsessions.

Three Women by Lisa Taddeo, Bloomsbury, £17.23, 416 pages