Beauty's Release
Originally published under the pseudonym of A. N. Roquelaure.
The final book in Anne Rice's erotic Sleeping Beauty series
Before E. L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey and Sylvia Day's Bared to You, there was Anne Rice’s provocative take on the timeless fairy tale “Sleeping Beauty.“ In the final volume of Anne Rice's deliciously tantalizing erotic trilogy, Beauty's adventures on the dark side of sexuality make her the bound captive of an Eastern Sultan and a prisoner in the exotic confines of the harem. As this voluptuous adult fairy tale moves toward conclusion, all Beauty's encounters with the myriad variations of sexual fantasy are presented in a sensuous, rich prose that intensifies this exquisite rendition of Love's secret world, and makes the Beauty series and incomparable study of erotica. In it, Anne Rice, writing as A. N. Roquelaure, makes the forbidden side of passion a doorway into the hidden regions of the psyche and the heart.
Anne Rice
Anne Rice (born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien; 1941–2021) was an American author of gothic fiction, Christian literature, and erotic literature. She was best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles. Books from The Vampire Chronicles were the subject of two film adaptations - Interview with the Vampire (1994) and Queen of the Damned (2002).
Born in New Orleans, Rice spent much of her early life there before moving to Texas, and later to San Francisco. She was raised in an observant Catholic family but became an agnostic as a young adult. She began her professional writing career with the publication of Interview with the Vampire in 1976, while living in California, and began writing sequels to the novel in the 1980s. In the mid-2000s, following a publicized return to Catholicism, Rice published the novels Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt and Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana, fictionalized accounts of certain incidents in the life of Jesus. Several years later she distanced herself from organized Christianity, citing disagreement with the Roman Catholic Church's stances on social issues but pledging that faith in God remained "central to [her] life." However, she later considered herself a secular humanist.
The Sleeping Beauty Quartet
The Sleeping Beauty Quartet consists of four books. The current recommended reading order for the series is provided below.