The heroine, O, is a young, beautiful fashion photographer in Paris. One day her lover, Rene, takes her to a chateau outside Paris, where she is enslaved, with Rene’s approval, and systematically whipped and sexually assaulted by various men. Later, Rene turns O over to Sir Stephen, an English friend who intensifies the brutality, branding O on the buttocks and inserting a ring bearing both their names, in one of her labia. But the final humiliation is yet to come…

“An ironic fable of unfreedom, a mystic document that transcends the pornographic and even the erotic…what lifts this fascinating book above mere perversity is this movement toward transcendence of the self through a gift of the self.” –Newsweek