Richard Flanagan's unlikely metaphors lined up against writers including Haruki Murakami and Kirsty Wark
Hot stuff to make your blood run cold … lava flows from the crater of a mountain. Photograph: Sonny Tumbelaka/AFP/Getty Images
Richard Flanagan's Booker-winning novel The Narrow Road to the Deep North, cited by judges of that prize as an "outstanding work of literature", has landed another, rather more dubious accolade: a spot on the shortlist for the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award, for a passage in which the act of love is interrupted by a dog killing a fairy penguin.
"He kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world. As they lost themselves in the circumnavigation of each other, there came from nearby shrill shrieks that ended in a deeper howl," writes Flanagan in a section of the passage marked out by the Literary Review as the reason for the novel's inclusion in this year's list of nominees. "Dorrigo looked up. A large dog stood at the top of the dune. Above blood-jagged drool, its slobbery mouth clutched a twitching fairy penguin."
More including full shortlist.
"He kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world. As they lost themselves in the circumnavigation of each other, there came from nearby shrill shrieks that ended in a deeper howl," writes Flanagan in a section of the passage marked out by the Literary Review as the reason for the novel's inclusion in this year's list of nominees. "Dorrigo looked up. A large dog stood at the top of the dune. Above blood-jagged drool, its slobbery mouth clutched a twitching fairy penguin."
More including full shortlist.
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