The blurb on the back:

Would Beautiful Carrie Risk Losing All She Possessed For a Few Passionate Moments In The Arms of Another Woman?
There was a time when Carrie experimented passionately with many beautiful young women. But she desperately wanted a more normal life. And when hard-working, steady Paul Anderson proposed, she married him.
Carrie was swiftly absorbed into the routine of marriage, hoping to stamp out the fires of her strange desires. But one day she met a completely uninhibited sex kitten named Kim Willis - who was teasing, tempting and willing to try something new in the ways of love.
For a while Carrie was able to lead a double life as one man's wife and another woman's plaything. But then there came a time when she had to choose between two loves.

Paula Christian was the author not only of this but also of Amanda, Another Kind of Love, The Cruise, Edge of Twilight, Love Is Where You Find It and This Side Of Love, all of which seem to date from the late 1950s and early 1960s and all of which were re-published by Timely Books in 1978-82.

Clearly then, there was an attempt to reclaim Ms Christian as ... what? A ground-breaking chronicler of lesbian lives? Something like that, I guess. I'd have to say, however, that it really doesn't work for me. I know I'm not a lesbian, but Backlash was a pretty successful work anyway, without me having to be. That book was like a proper novel - providing insight into a world and those who inhabit it. By contrast, The Other Side of Desire - in my far from humble opinion - reads like a a very dull set of clichés.

Of course, the fact that this is set in America, not North London, may be working against it for me.