Enter for your chance to Win one of 6 x Other Lovers books by Natalia Rachel valued at $24.95 each.
Love Sex Poetry Peace
"All I ever wanted was to be loved. I think it's all anyone of us really wants underneath it all. And for many of us, that unconscious hunger for love finds us chasing everything that love is not…"
What if the way we search for love is the very thing keeping it out of reach?
In her bold, sexy and emotionally raw debut novel Other Lovers, author Natalia Rachel pulls apart the modern dating landscape and the eternal quest for real love.
Book One in the Love Sex Poetry Peace trilogy, Other Lovers speaks to what many women are feeling but rarely say out loud " the exhaustion of performing for love, the quiet self-abandonment, and the belief that connection must be earned rather than received.
"All my life, I'd been taught to perform for love. To get the grades for a pat on the head. Be a good girl to get a treat. Wear the short skirt to get the guy's eyes on my prize. Give to receive. Earn my own money, so I don't show any need. Get into the gym and prove this old mama is MILF quality and not some old maid who'll go unseen. And the return on investment for all this performance, was meant to be love… but really it was anything but." Other Lovers
As the award-winning author of the non-fiction book Why Am I Like This? (Penguin Random House), Natalia believes fiction has become an effective way to tell the deeper truth about women's lives.
Described as "therapy in a book", Other Lovers explores healing through fiction, without becoming self-help or memoir.
"This book was born from everything I've witnessed " as an educator, and as a woman who has loved, lost and had to learn how to love again. It's not about perfection in relationships. It's about becoming conscious in them," Natalia says.
Other Lovers centres on Lena, a divorced mother of two who re-enters the dating world after nearly two decades of marriage.
What she encounters is not romantic liberation, but a version of love in midlife that is far more complicated " and confronting " than she ever imagined.
While running a global business, Lena navigates a toxic, app-driven dating landscape, emotional entanglement and sexual awakening.
Slowly, she begins to recognise a painful truth: years of unhealthy relationship patterns and minimal boundaries have shaped a version of love built on performance – one designed to secure safety, validation and belonging, rather than genuine intimacy.
"The unavailable man is a common species, swimming in the f*cked-up dating pool. Another common species is the anxious, disempowered woman, who continues to lap up less love than she deserves. Together, they tend to do the most embarrassing unconscious dating dance. He reels her in and throws her back, again and again and again, and she swims around in an emotional turmoil, shaking her seductive ass, until she is next hooked and can start the ridiculous dance all over again." Other Lovers
Lena must unlearn everything she thought she knew about relationships before she can become available to love " and be loved.
"When we make ourselves smaller to be loved, we will never be able to receive it. I was so hungry for love I would shrink myself into an oven-dried miniature version of myself to receive it. I would erode my own spirit. Pack parts of myself away. To become lovable." Other Lovers
Thankfully, Lena does not walk this path alone. Surrounded by an unapologetically honest circle of friends, who are themselves redesigning what love is, a fabulous date-ready wardrobe and the steady presence of a therapist who refuses to let her bypass her truth – she begins the messy, humorous and deeply human work of coming home to herself.
Set against a backdrop of fancy cocktails, exotic locations and sexual heat, Other Lovers is not a glossy rom-com about finding "the one", instead, it's a psychologically astute exploration of how women heal, desire and detach from patterns that no longer serve them.
As the story develops, Lena's journey becomes less about finding the right partner and more about reclaiming her own sovereignty.
"I realised that this deep guttural feeling was what I had been running from all along… I knew that it would take years. But one thing I knew for certain " I would never give my power away to a man again." Other Lovers
Drawing on her background as a trauma-informed educator and speaker, Natalia brings a deep understanding of attachment and emotional patterning into the narrative – not as instruction, but as lived experience.
Natalia has been writing poetry since the age of seven, and a distinctive feature of Other Lovers is her use of verse, woven throughout the novel as emotional doorways into each chapter.
"Her ache is my ache.
Her longing is my longing.
And as I meet her in the mirrored hallway of my inner world,
the chains begin to fall." Other Lovers
Unflinching and intimate, Other Lovers is genre-defying contemporary fiction, refusing to sanitise women's emotional and erotic lives. It is a story for anyone who has loved deeply, lost themselves along the way, and is brave enough to try again " but differently.
"As we welcome grief, we welcome love. As we let go of all that is not love, we evolve into a version of ourselves who is ready to give and receive the kind of love that we have been craving all along." Other Lovers
Other Lovers
Series: Love Sex Poetry Peace (Book One)
by Natalia Rachel
Illuma Vision
RRP: $24.95
