The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
More commonly known as Carol, this tale of aspiring set designer Therese, who falls in love with an older woman, is a masterclass in sexual tension. As a reader you know it is all going to go wrong – homosexuality was illegal in 1950s New York, the novel’s setting, and ultimately the sex scene we wait so long for threatens to ruin Carol’s chances of gaining custody of her daughter – but Highsmith has you completely under her spell, and you can’t help but root for this ill-fated couple. Through Therese, Carol is presented to us as impossibly sexy but always slightly out of reach, creating the perfect conditions for desire to build.
Open Water by Caleb Azumah Nelson
More slow-burning passion is found in one of 2021’s most celebrated debuts, Azumah Nelson’s elegant boy-meets-girl tale set in late 00s London. The unnamed lovers, a photographer and a dancer, talk and touch and sleep in the same bed well before they finally give in to desire. I became consumed by this novel as the couple become consumed by each other, growing more intimate as the hazy London summers go on: “The arm which isn’t trapped between her body and yours stretches towards her, and she pulls it across her body like a blanket, curling in tight.”
All About Love by bell hooks
It almost seems a shame to recommend this book purely on its passages about sex, since hooks is so astute on every aspect of what Gloria Steinem called “the most sought-after and least examined emotion”. Yet hooks’ observations on the ways that love and sex interact (or don’t: “Exciting, pleasurable sex can take place between two people who do not even know each other”) are to my mind pretty unrivalled. When it comes to both love and sex, hooks tells us to ask for what we want, a concept that will be familiar to anyone who has engaged with any kind of sex-positive movement.
Beautiful World, Where Are You by Sally Rooney
When the TV adaptation of Rooney’s Normal People was released during lockdown, the 41 minutes of sex scenes were discussed at length. But it’s the more recent Beautiful World, Where Are You, which follows two of the author’s signature on-and-off couples, in which Rooney’s writing about sex is probably at its best. Elsewhere, I was irritated by the long ruminative emails, but when it comes to young intelligent beautiful people having a very specific kind of intense, self-aware sex, Rooney’s writing is unbeatable.
The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter
I first read this short story collection in the long summer before my A-levels, and I couldn’t believe my luck. I had been in very few environments prior to that point in which it was acceptable to talk about sexuality or desire, and now here was Carter, asking me to contend with characters consumed by carnal sensuality and learning to navigate their sexual agency. Plus, I was getting graded for it! Carter’s depictions of sex are not always as radical as they could perhaps be: pleasure for the characters often comes with some kind of pain, and it is only heterosexual (or bestial) sex that is explored here. Nevertheless, this is the book that made me think about sex from a feminist perspective.
Fun Home by Alison Bechdel
Bechdel’s first graphic memoir, the inspiration for the Tony award-winning musical of the same name, simultaneously tells the story of the cartoonist’s father, a closeted gay man until his premature death, and her own story of growing up and coming out as a lesbian. I love the strips that show Bechdel and her university girlfriend Joan.
How to be Both by Ali Smith
This is a novel that intentionally surprises the reader – depending on which version you pick up, the two halves of the story will be ordered differently – and its portrayals of sex, which appear via a haunting porn video and a 1460s Italian brothel, offer more surprises still. Smith never shies away from the fact that sex can be complicated and unhealthy, but she also shows sex (and importantly for me, as I first read this book as a closeted lesbian in my late teens, sex between two women) as being tender, joyful and sometimes funny.
Giovanni’s Room by James Baldwin
If you are looking for healthy, joyful portrayals of sex, turn to other books on this list: David, the narrator of this short but near-perfect novel, is full of shame and repulsion towards his own sexual desires, eventually learning – the hard way – that he cannot shake off his homosexuality. Baldwin beautifully describes his characters finding sexual connection (“it was like moving into the field of a magnet or like approaching a small circle of heat” and taking pleasure in one another – made all the more heartbreaking by our knowing from the outset it won’t last.
The Camomile Lawn by Mary Wesley
Towards the end of Mary Wesley’s bestselling 1984 novel, when the characters we meet as young adults are approaching old age, smart, practical Polly is addressed by her adult son. “I should have thought,” he says, “that in the war, with the bombing and so on, there wasn’t much time for private life.” His mother is quick to correct him – in fact she and the other central characters in this wartime novel have so much sex that when it was adapted for TV just over 30 years ago tabloids called it “The Camomile Porn”. The many expressions of sexuality in this novel, from sex used as a coping mechanism to what we might now refer to as a throuple, are told without shame or moralism – the reader is left to draw their own conclusions.
A Curious History of Sex by Kate Lister
If you are looking for more informative books about sex, you could do a lot worse than starting with Lister’s anecdote-stuffed and hugely entertaining tour of sexual quirks, kinks and myths from years gone by. Full of disgusting, dangerous and jaw-dropping beliefs from the past, from the concept that feeding a barley cake to a snake could act as a “virginity test” to grafting a monkey’s testicle to one’s scrotum as a cure for impotence, this entertaining read has a more serious aim at its core: to hold the sexual oppression faced by women and other marginalised groups throughout history to account.
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