When Suzanne rents a cabin for the summer, she is intent upon spending her days swimming in the nearby lake, and her nights alone or with occasional strangers. But her seclusion is broken when she receives a reply to a personal ad she has placed in a local paper: the letter is postmarked 'Stillwater State Prison'. The letter is from a man called Alpha Breville: convict, thief, rapist. When she was sixteen, Suzanne was raped by her friend's brother, and the memory of the man she calls 'my rapist' still haunts her. She chooses to write back to Alpha, but what begins as a remote correspondence quickly evolves into something much more dangerous, exciting, and intimate. All at once, they seem to have transgressed every boundary between them. The pair embark on a sexually charged relationship that tests the lines between control and abandonment, power and vulnerability, compulsion and desire, innocence and culpability. Written in measured, intense, and disarmingly honest prose, Thief is a hard-hitting and uncompromising novel about women's relationship with their bodies; about power, control and sex.