Recommendations for something sexy but not total trash

[OhMargaret]

Does anyone write books like this anymore? I want to read something equally filthy and intelligent - help me out

Don't bother with Jilly Cooper - go straight to Rebecca Chance.

The wolf border by Sarah Hall has some of the best written sex scenes I have ever read. It's about rewilding in Cumbria.

@Geelonggetalong Many thanks 😁 Just browsing thru some of her books on Kindle and it seems like it's right up my, erm, my friend's street 😝 Crikey those descriptions of Juan the pool boy 💥💥💪

Thanks again for your help, never would have discoverd this gem by myself!

all fours by miranda july. so freakin' good.

Try 'Bad Brides' if you're starting on Rebecca Chance. I'm afraid I didn't like her other books so much.

I just read All Fours as well, I preferred Bonding out of the two but I find Miranda July really funny - a bit self-consciously quirky sometimes but she's great.

Thank you @MaudGone

This is one of my favourite books

I've been very much into the Romantasy genre this year. I would never have previously thought I'd enjoy this type of book, but I read Fourth Wing because of the BookTok hype and loved it so much that I've read very little else this year! For good stories and a healthy dose of spice I can recommend:

• Fourth Wing and Iron Flame
• A Court of Thorns and Roses series (not too sexy in the first book, but gets much more heated as you go on in the series)
• Blood and Ash series

I agree with you, OP, there are not enough erotic literary novels published these days. I can’t think of the last recently-published book I read which made me think ‘oooh.’ So apologies if you’ve already read all these.

The Swan Thieves by Elizabeth Kostova is sexy in a quiet way, for anyone who finds obsession, taboo and longing sexy. Definitely not jam-packed with banging. Moon Tiger by Penelope Lively (written mid eighties so not exactly new) struck me as erotically charged but disturbing when I read it twenty years ago.

Another not new but IMO under-rated book is Gordon by Edith Templeton. It’s not PC (think a post-war Fifty Shades with a rather grim little man as the ‘love’ interest) but it’s definitely about the power of sex. It has a lot to say about how we lose our minds over the strangest men, and about the power sex bestows (and removes). Her short story collection, Darts Of Cupid, is great, and particularly the title story, which is 🔥

I wouldn't recommend these books if you want good writing. They were recommended to me and I couldn't believe how bad the writing was. The sex scenes are so terrible they literally made me laugh out loud.

Gordon by Edith Templeton - I'd completely forgotten about this one! Agree, it's very British, very old school but it deserves to be read more widely.

The book I came back on this thread to recommend (Mariel Franklin's Bonding) has a similar set-up actually, it's about a single, self-reliant woman in her thirties who finds herself leading an increasingly lonely and unstable life through no fault of her own (I'm in my thirties too, married now but I found the depiction of single working life in today's London very accurate). She loses her job and books an impulsive flight to get out of the city, which is where she meets the man that changes everything in a way that i did not see coming. It's a sexy book - the sex scenes are extremely well written - but it's also about 'sex' on a more iliterary level ie. what liberation really means today, what the unintended side effects of the sexual revolution have been and how those are playing out for modern women in the 21st century. I haven't read anything like it for a very long time, it had echoes of Lady's Chatterley's Lover for me, as if that book started a conversation about sex and freedom and this book is answering the same questions from the perspective of a woman living a century later.

The Marrying Game by Kate Saunders (ex FT journalist who also writes lovely imaginative books for kids) is set around Christmas and has a really good storyline and definitely some sex. Can't recall how racy but it's definitely adult not YA I would say.