A thrilling literary epic about sex, friendship, feminism, and love beyond labels, set against the neon-lit porn world of 1980s Los Angeles.

Los Angeles,1982: eighteen-year-old Jude steps off the bus onto Hollywood Boulevard, looking for her best friend, Winnie. When she finds her at Ladies of the Valley, a strip club known for its connections to the adult film industry, the two friends embark on an adventure through the golden age of pornography, from magazine work for Penthouse and Hustler, to shooting hardcore adult films. The girls find money and fame, but the trappings of success can’t protect them from their own ambition, setting the stage for a dramatic betrayal that culminates in Jude’s disappearance.

Thirty years later, newly divorced and down-on-her-luck, Winnie decides it is time to face her past. Determined to solve the mystery of what happened to Jude, she sets out to brave the dark underbelly of the adult industry she was once intimately familiar with. The resulting search involves porn stars past and present, a drug dealing palm tree salesman, a starlet turned multilevel marketing saleswoman, and a heroin hooked outlaw, all of whom may hold the key to unlocking the tragic mystery of Jude’s disappearance.

With Joan Didion’s eye for California’s allure and shadows, and told in a two-part structure reminiscent of Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies, Lovers XXX is a hypnotic novel of friendship and self-invention, of sexual identity beyond binaries, and of the costs of giving one’s body to the performance of sex. Above all, it is a love story like no other—between two ardent, vulnerable, and revelatory women.