A girl with a white oval face, almond-shaped eyes and a long neck sat at the back of a wooden Thai house in Chiang Rai in 1989. She was curious about something that was taking place in an adjoining room. Every few seconds she pressed her right ear against a crack in the wooden wall, but she could not clearly hear the conversation between a fat woman and a European man. Presently, she stood up. She was five feet nine inches tall, with nicely shaped arms and legs, long fingers and full, wide lips. Her white skin made her appear almost European and a short hairstyle completed this suggestion. She was not beautiful, but her mannerisms and demeanour gave her a character that was very attractive to men. Her slight figure with well-shaped breasts, an innate shyness and a ready smile exuded a strong feeling of sympathetic sex appeal. Her name was Shan. When restless ex-pat Richard Dido meets divorcee Faran Muliner in an up-country bar in provincial Thailand, it's the start of a unique friendship. Idealistic Faran finds an unlikely kindred spirit in Richard and, taking their pick of local courtesans, the two men launch into an orgiastic lifestyle unfettered by the restrictions of their puritan pasts. Teenage beauty Shan, the most popular girl in the local bordello, moves in to make a ménage a trois and all seems bliss in their self-made Eden; but when Faran falls for Shan, the two men find their ideals - and their paradise - under threat. Based on the real-life Thai diaries of an exiled libertine, A Painted Paragon offers an explicit view into a world where sex holds no shame and true morality lies in a full appreciation of life's sensuousness.