The Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards 2008 - the shortlist

Yep, it's that time of year again and thanks to The Bookseller we get to know the shortlisted tomes considered worthy of the award in 2008.  The winner will be announced next Tuesday, November 25th at the Naval and Military Club on Piccadilly in London - commonly known as the "In and Out" Club.

The purpose of the award is to "draw attention to the crude, tasteless, often perfunctory use of redundant passages of sexual description in the modern novel, and to discourage it".  (Click that link to see last year's beauties.)

The 2008 shortlist:

All in the Mind  by Alastair Campbell (Hutchinson); The Gate of Air by James Buchan (MacLehose Press); Sashenka by Simon Montefiore (Bantam Press); The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike (Hamish Hamilton); To Love, Honour and Betray by Kathy Lette  (Bantam Press); Shire Hell by Rachel Johnson (Penguin); Attachment by Isabel Fonseca (Chatto & Windus); Triptych of a Young Woolf by Ann Allestree (Book Guild Publishing); The Reserve by Russell Banks (Bloomsbury); and Brida by Paulo Coelho (HarperCollins).

The Guardian has some excerpts from this year's crowd here.