Shortlist Announced for 2014 Bad Sex in Fiction Award

"I think this is one of the strongest shortlists in recent years, containing some real literary heavyweights," said the magazine's Jonathan Beckman. "Flanagan swaddles the encounter in so many abstract nouns that the whole experience becomes very obscure and desexualised. The Murakami seems weirdly frictionless, an opportunity for metaphor-making above anything else."

The prize, described by the Literary Review itself as "Britain's most dreaded," has the goal of finding "the most egregious passage of sexual description in a work of fiction." Created by Auberon Waugh in 1993, its stated purpose is to call attention to "perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual descriptions in modern fiction, and to discourage them."