Elegantly beautiful and decadently smutty at the same time. Definitely one of my favorite books this year. 
 I generally don't like the meta story-within-story writer books, not at all. They always strike me as a writer being entirely too caught up in the process of writing. He/she is so caught up with writing a book that they can't write about anything but writing a book. Ugh. Spare me. Anyway, this story doesn't suffer from that. Honestly, this book is about more things than I can to get into right now. It's about love and loss and how they fit together, and about how sometimes giving up is the only thing you can do. I loved this book--deeply, wonderfully, passionately. (And the second book is actually better, if you can believe that! I loved this one so much I bought the follow-up and gobbled it up before even coming back here to write this review.) 
 Reisz's characters are evocative and memorable. It could be argued that they are all too physically perfect, perhaps, there is not an plain person among the main characters. I only noticed that in retrospect though, as I was too busy being swept up in their lives while I was reading. 
 Let me be clear. These books aren't for the faint of heart. They are deeply disturbing on a lot of levels. There's a lot of real pain here, especially when the histories of some of the characters starts to be revealed. 
 If you are at all squeamish about sexual kink, you probably want to give this one a pass, but you're missing out. ;)