Valentine's Day: The best bad sex scenes from books

Who needs Shakespeare when you can read your beloved these 'delights'?

From Fifty Shades of Grey to Lady Chatterley's Lover - bad sex in books is worth a laugh this Valentine's Day (Getty Images)

For better or for worse, there’s no escaping Valentine’s Day. The high street is awash with cringe cards, teddy bears and roses as the world prepares to celebrate love - in some vague sense of the word.

So will you be reading your beloved a Shakespearen sonnet in a grand gesture of romance? Probably not. Instead, why not explore the vast array of ‘erotic’ literature that past writers have so kindly bestowed upon us for such occasions?

There’s EL James’ bestselling Fifty Shades of Grey and the “wild and wanton” version of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice for starters. Then there's the Bad Sex Awards nominees from bygone years, won in 2013 by Manil Suri for the subatomic bisexual orgy he describes in The City of Devi.

“Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes and with it the sea and the sands – only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains,” reads the winning extract. “We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice”

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If nothing else, the best relationships involve laughter – something these supposedly sexy but actually oh-so-bizarre extracts are sure to encourage.

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