Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction Award

The winner of The Literary Review’s Bad Sex in Fiction award for 2013 is the novel The City of Devi (M) by Manil Suri.  Manil Suri is a respected writer, having been previously nominated for the Man Booker prize and PEN/Faulkner Fiction.

“Mumbai has emptied under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation; gangs of marauding Hindu and Muslim thugs rove the desolate streets; yet Sarita can think of only one thing: buying the last pomegranate that remains in perhaps the entire city. She is convinced that the fruit holds the key to reuniting her with her physicist husband, Karun, who has been mysteriously missing for more than a fortnight.” -publisher.

Here is a steamy excerpt:

“Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands – only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice”

Also in the running (and in our collection) were the following:

House of Earth: a novel (M)
by Woody Guthrie

Secrecy (M)
by Rupert Thomson

Motherland (M)
by William Nicholson

My Education (M)
by Susan Choi