Really good books that happen to be sexy

[k80pie]

With two little kids things have been slowing down in the libido department (okay, ground to a halt), and I figured reading something with a bit of sauce might help.

Really want books that are actually really good, not looking for 'sexy' books of the trashy variety though, if you get me.

I really like Sally Rooney, Kiley Reid, Anne Tyler, Anne Enright...modern fiction about real lives - not really into historical stuff. Anyone got any recs?

Emilie Pine, Ruth and Pen
Miriam Toews, All My Puny Sorrows
Megan Nolan, Acts of Desperation
Eimear McBride, The Lesser Bohemians and Strange Hotel
Nicole Flattery, Nothing Special (or her short stories Show Them A Good Time)

Oh, and if you like Anne Tyler, you might like Alice McDermott, who is a genius.

Also, have you read everything by Enright? Some of her lesser-known novels before The Gathering are brilliant.

Thanks for these @Burnfort ! I've just requested a few from the library.

I haven't read a ton of Enright - I haven't even read The Wren, The Wren yet - but I'll keep that in mind, thank you.... (though she's not exactly known for sauciness, no?)

There’s a fair bit of sex in The Wren, The Wren, including a vaguely unpleasant S and M one between one of the narrators and a man called Felim! I was going to recommend Enright’s The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch, but you don’t like historical novels.

I very, very thoroughly recommend Toews and Alice McDermott, and if you like them, both are fairly prolific. Have you read any Edna O’Brien?

Another strong recommendation for intelligent literary fiction with a lot of sex is Mary Gaitskill — maybe start with her novel Veronica? The film Secretary is a sweetened-up version of one of her short stories in the collection Bad Behaviour.

I always recommend a US author called Laurie Colwin, who died very young in the 90s, leaving five novels, which are funny and clever, and focus entirely on relationships among comfortably-off New Yorkers — sort of latter-day Jane Austen, focusing on courtship and marriage, set in late 20thc Manhattan? Rather hard to buy outside the US as she’s very little known, but some are now available for Kindle, and others are being made so later this year. She’s not raunchy, because that’s not her style, but Family Happiness is about a ‘perfect’ married woman married to a lovable man and still conducting a longterm affair.

Not a novel but John Donne's love poems always make me a bit hot under the collar.

Emily Henry fits the bill. Particularly Beach Read and People we meet on Vacation.

@Burnfort Thanks for these…I haven’t read Edna O’Brien - just looked her up, is The Country Girls the one you’d go for?

Oh and I really like Laurie Colwin! I’ve only read Happy All The Time, but I’ll get Family Happiness - thanks for reminding me about her! (By the by, I actually managed to get hold of a couple of books she wrote about her home cooking style, which are interesting, kind of in the vein of How To Eat by Nigella.)

I thought Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith were very saucy. (Oh, I feel like Miranda Hart using that word.)

Oh, delighted to meet another LC fan (I’ve glanced at Home Cooking, but don’t own any of the cookery books) — try Shine On, Bright and Dangerous Object and A Big Storm Knocked It Over, which are my favourites. I confess to wanting to kick Holly Sturgis in Happy All the Time.

Re EOB, she’s still writing in her 90s (though very frail) and is hugely prolific, and has had a number of very different types of style and subject matter since The Country Girls (and its two sequels), but yes, that’s probably as good a place to start as any.

They are sexy as hell.

Anaïs Nin - Delta of Venus. It is filth, but it is literary filth (skip over the grown up daughter and father chapter [vomit]

Thanks so much everyone for the fab recommendations!