DESIRE: 100 of Literature's Sexiest Stories

The Edwardian heroine Eveline with her unstoppable sexuality opens this collection of stories where desire is the driving narrative force. Eveline's highly explicit encounter with the anonymous priapic gentleman in a railway carriage epitomises a common fantasy of having sex with a complete stranger. The first section, headlined "Awakening Desire", also includes Kate Chopin's "A Respectable Woman" who fights an intense desire for her husband's friend and overcomes it - or does she? "A Night in a Moorish Harem" incorporates several stories of enthusiastically lost virginity, while extracts from Dracula and Lady Chatterley's Lover need no introduction. D. H. Lawrence describes not just a sexual encounter but also the awkwardness of class-consciousness and the fear that the lovers may be using each other, shot through with the awareness that not every sex act is satisfying for both parties. Angela Carter's nightmarish "The Bloody Chamber" is a feminist rewriting of the Bluebeard fairy tale, powerfully atmospheric in its Gothic detail. The second section, "Burning Desire", opens with an extract from Cleland's celebrated 18th century novel Fanny Hill, for which Cleland was first prosecuted, then given a government pension. Fanny, like many of this book's heroines, offers a half-hearted refusal but is soon carried away by "effusions of pleasure". "The life and amours of Kate Percival" may be genuine Victorian erotica or a later pastiche, but either way Kate is up for lesbian and well as straight sex. Molly Bloom's monologue from the conclusion of Joyce's Ulysses is a justly celebrated stream of consciousness. In Roald Dahl's "The great switcheroo" the narrator lusts after the unattainable Samantha Rainbow and plots with her husband to swap beds for the night, using the same aftershave and approaching sex the same way in the dark. But he gets rather more than he bargained for. The final section "Darkest Desire" looks at the more unvarnished aspects of sex, sometimes brutal and often involving revenge, starting with the Marquis de Sade's Justine. Heavyweight 720pp.