This is a dirty, sexy little book that had me slavering with senseless lust. Need I say any more?

Oh, all right, most of you probably know by now that try as I might to appear like a girl from the gutter, I’m really a cultivated acolyte of Erato, the muse of sensual poetry; no book holds my attention for long unless it has a smattering of literary merit. There are eight stories in this collection, which is part two of a very dirty duo. I skipped part one to get to the daringly poetic Dream a Little Dream by Sessha Batto. Sombrely sexy, it flirts with darkness and alludes to deathly themes in a language that is alive and sensual.

Then I doubled back for a scintillating sci-fi snippet from telepathic Cecilia Tan. Later I savoured the paradoxes of Sharazade and the Shakespearian sexual shenanigans of Tessie L’Amour.

But don’t worry, this collection shouldn’t tax your literary faculties too much. The stories are very short and the direct assault on your senses offered by Nobilis Reed, Summer Daniels, Nan Allen and Ayoub Khote should allow you to switch off your higher brain and tune into your primal priorities without further ado.

I wasn’t expecting much of The Improbable Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, to be honest. I listened to a quite well written introduction by, I presume, John Joseph Adams, which was read by someone who insisted on pronouncing Moriarty as Moriarity about fifteen times, which didn’t bode well.

But the stories themselves were surprisingly good. I haven’t listened to them all yet but I really look forward to them and most of the time I’m not disappointed. I like listening in the dark. Some of them are very spooky. They are also witty in a way, playing upon our expectations. They’ve all been published before in some form so they have a pedigree. There are some great writers here and some Victoriana specialists, so the standard is generally very high.

So if you like Sherlock Holmes (I love him!) and you’re open-minded, give it a try. The stories are a little improbable but that’s why they’re fun. Even die-hard fans of Sir Arthur (I’m one!) won’t be disappointed by these re-workings of the famous Conan Doyle canon.

(Everyone who reviews this book has to mention the Conan Doyle canon.)

This is a poignant, short novella that lasts just over 3 hours in the unabridged version I listened to.

The bare bones of the story form a very potent plot but the narrative is somewhat dry. Since it spans over 50 years and the lives of the main characters are set against the turbulent political changes in China in that period, from the Japanese invasion, through the rise of Mao Zedong to the end of British colonial rule in Hong Kong, it is hard for the author to squeeze in the telling personal details that touch your heart.

Consequently, I was not drawn into the drama of the characters’ lives; their emotions were at one remove.

You only have to glance at the stills from the movie to see how much more powerful it is. It has more colour, more life, more emotion. The actors’ faces make you want to cry.

The narrator of the audio book is a famous Hollywood actress, Nancy Kwan, but her pronunciation of the Chinese names was so mangled and so inconsistent that I sometimes wasn’t sure who she was talking about. Never mind. The real Chinese diaspora has only just started. Give it a few more years and everybody in the world will be speaking fluent Mandarin, even our lovely friends from Hong Kong.

I needed a well-scrubbed, de-cluttered, pristine flat before I could appreciate this fine graphic novel, which had been lying around in a pile of clutter for several months until today.

The author is Bryan Talbot, who was a comic artist with, I am told, a god-like reputation in England at the time he decided to publish this under a pseudonym. It was a departure. But if you are familiar with Bryan Talbot’s work you will know that he doesn’t fit comfortably into any genre and that he likes to take risks and go off at a tangent even within a single work.

This story is very focused, though. I like it a lot. It’s wordless and told in crisp, black and white images that are playful, repetitive and poignant. I found it very moving. It’s the story of a man and a woman whose natures make it impossible for them to be together. Some people might see the story as simplistic but I like the simplicity of it. It strips down the relationship to its essential constituents of erotic need and emotional isolation. Some of it is funny. I laughed out loud on page 52 and my flatmate dashed across the room and started reading over my shoulder. “Let me scan it and post it on Facebook!” she said.

“No, certainly not!,” I cried. “It’s important to protect the artist’s revenue potential! This has not been a big earner for him.”

I read the rest of it in silence in my bedroom, which was most appropriate given what happens on pages 66 and 67. (The 64-page story starts on page 4, by the way.)

I’m intrigued by successful artists and writers who, at the height of their fame, publish quirky little books under a pseudonym. On page 35, in panels 13 and 14, the shadows behind the bridge crossed by the lovers spell HOAX. This hoax may not have made much money for Bryan Talbot, but it has made me want to read more of his work. He’s still alive, I think, so I hope he’ll get a little frisson of pleasure when he gets his next royalty cheque and notices a slight uptick thanks to the largesse of a certain erotically inclined Asian by the name of Vanessa Wu.

I thought for a very long time before making one of my books free on the Kindle. In the end, I chose Lust in Leather, which I’ve only just published. It was one of those situations, so common in my life, where I thought for months about option A and option B, and didn’t really like either of them so then I did option C totally on impulse.

The reason I hesitated to make something free was that I knew it was potentially going to be read by a much wider audience. An unsympathetic audience. An audience that didn’t care. This made me nervous.

The reason you make something free, of course, is for promotional reasons. You can gather new readers. You can widen your exposure. You can boast that your book rocketed to the number 1 slot on the Amazon chart for Kindle/Fiction/Erotica/Asian/Chinese/Leather Fetish/set it Nottingham and featuring Faye Wong.

But the fact that your book is your advert means that it has to be the best you can make it. Many authors fail because their free book is sloppy and full of mistakes. Probably mine has mistakes too, I don’t know. Obviously, I tried to catch them all before I published it.

When I was alerted to the fact that my book had become free (it is difficult to control the timing precisely) I was out at the shops, so I rushed to read a copy on my iPhone just to check everything was OK. Too late if it wasn’t. I was nervous as hell. I stood in the busy make-up department at Selfridges surrounded by seductive scents and pressed on all sides by women on a mission. It was the perfect environment for reading the story. I was captivated and couldn’t stop. Oh my God, I’m aroused by own story, I thought. Is this like laughing at your own jokes? And in public too!

But what I wanted to say was that, although it’s free, it didn’t come easy. It took me months to write and the cover alone went through 5 versions before I approved it. And the story, though it features explicit sexual imagery, is about being a woman and the tough decisions we sometimes face in life, in business and in romance. Like when to give something away.

Lust in Leather will be free to download on Amazon in the US, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain and France until the end of January. I’m delighted to see that I now have some German and French readers, who have gone beyond lust in leather and are trying some of my other books too.

Here’s where you can find Lust in Leather on:

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Amazon.de

Amazon.fr

Amazon.it

Amazon.es

There are some really exciting things happening in science fiction these days and ten of them are in this collection by Paolo Bacigalupi.

The blurb on the back says there are eleven stories but I could only find ten. Still, they are very good value. In fact I own this collection as a paperback and an audio book because I liked it so much. I enjoy flicking through and reading passages again and again, as well as listening to the stories while I’m cycling serenely in the gym.

I’d like to recommend this author to more people but usually I only get as far as “Paolo – um.” Why can’t authors have simple names like Vanessa and Wu?

My favourite story in the collection is called The Fluted Girl. It is very rich in ideas, shows a mature command of narrative structure and is sensual and sensitive. There is actually more than one fluted girl in the story, two sisters, Lidia and Nia, who perform a kind of musical pornography for a wealthy patron. The horrific conceit of turning these girls into flutes is tempered by Paolo’s seductive handling of language and metaphor.

All eyes turned to the pale girls on stage. Lidia could feel their eyes, hungry, yearning, almost physical as their gazes pressed against her. She moved her hands beneath her sister’s shift, clasping her close. Her sister’s hands touched her hips, closing stops in her fluted body. At their new embrace a sigh of yearning came from the crowd, a whisper of their own hungers made musical.

This must be one of the few erotic incest stories still available on Amazon and there are other things in the collection far more terrible, yet these stories have a rare literary quality that sets them apart. I enjoy the way Paolo writes. I love his language, his plots and his ideas.

What higher recommendation is there than this?

This book is a bad buy for a book blogger. Volume 1 is so huge that it will probably take me a year or more to finish it. Meanwhile my blog will become an arid desert, deprived of nourishment, a victim of the Great World Slump, while I idle away depraved hours in the company of this prolific perfectionist.

In the introduction, Mr. Ballard accuses modern readers of having lost the knack of reading short stories. They are too used to baggy and long-winded TV soaps. Most novels, he claims, “would have been better if they had been recast as short stories.”

But the short story still survives, especially, he says, in science fiction. Not that Mr, Ballard writes science fiction. He describes the settings of his own work as “a kind of visionary present.”

I have read one of J.G. Ballard’s novels (see my earlier review of Cocaine Nights) but apparently even that, like most of his novels, was first tried out and tested in short story form.

As a devotee of short stories, I am predisposed to approve of Mr. Ballard’s observations but I would add that he neglects to mention erotic stories. Some of his stories are erotic but not as intensely erotic as the kind I prefer.

I would argue that erotic fiction works best in short story form. I have tried a few flabby erotic novels and tired of them long before the climax. There are exceptions, of course, and I’ve reviewed a few in my blog, but even erotic novelists are still intensely active in the short story form and for very good reasons.

So anyway, I’m giving this collection of not especially erotic stories 5 stars because it is brilliant, engrossing and stimulating and inspires me to go on with my own highly concentrated craft.

It’s quite good when you’re on a diet, too. Think lean!

In a sense this book gets my highest recommendation because I lent it and my Kindle to my flatmate when she asked me to suggest some light bedtime reading. I don’t like recommending books and especially not dirty ones so I hope you appreciate what a rare gesture this was.

Did my flatmate like it? She did. She agreed that it was funny, light, charming, and erotic. It’s sexy without being shameful and clever without making any demands.

It reminded me of the works of P.G. Wodehouse, which are likewise peopled with charming eccentrics, deftly plotted and perfectly paced. I was tempted to dub Jeremy Edwards the P.G. Wodehouse of porn but this story is too innocent to be porn and if it’s like P.G. Wodehouse, it’s P.G. Wodehouse not quite at the top of his form.

Of course, the comparison with a writer of genius is unfair, but, like The Pleasure Dial itself, ultimately irresistible.

So, go on, give Jeremy’s Pleasure Dial a twirl!

I read this book more than a month ago and let it settle in my mind before writing this review. I did this deliberately because I think few readers could have the same response as me to this book or read it with the same appreciation. I do not know the author exactly but I feel I know her through our shared experiences.

Like me, she is originally from China, has an academic background and was steeped in English language and literature before coming to England and continuing her studies here. In The Same Moon, she documents her experiences in these two vastly different cultural environments with painstaking honesty and care. Almost every sentence resonated with me in a special way as I recognised something I knew to be true, or had seen, or had felt somewhere on my own journey to the west.

This morning, having not looked at the book for a few weeks, something strange happened as I prepared to write this review. I couldn’t remember if the book was written in the third or the first person. This never happens to me. Even if I forget a plot (which happens often), I never, ever forget this technical aspect of the narrative.

I reached for my Kindle to check but the battery was dead. It was so dead that even when I plugged my Kindle in, I couldn’t yet use it.

While I was waiting for it to recharge, I came to the conclusion that the book must have been written in the third person, despite its intensely personal subject matter.

Why is this important, you might think? Well, to me it is very important indeed because it determines how readers engage with the story, the characters and the narrator.

The book itself contains the seed of this confusion. Is it a novel or a memoir? Is it a diary, a chronicle or a fiction?

There are diary extracts in it. At times it reads like a meticulous reconstruction. There are details in it that are not necessary for the exposition of the story. There is no plot powering the narrative along. There are often lengthy asides, thoughts, and observations that, while interesting and sometimes moving, are Tolstoyan in their irrelevance.

After reading this book you will be an expert in how to go about securing a place in a Chinese university in the late 1980s, for example. There is a little disquisition on the power and importance of dreams. Late in the novel, under the sub-heading “Fun flat-mates” there are convincing and thoughtful character sketches of four or five people who play no part whatsoever in the story.

These irrelevancies are not without merit. It must be interesting for readers to know, for example, that people from Hong Kong look down on those of us from mainland China and that they have to talk to us in English because we can’t understand their Chinese and they can’t understand ours, even if, instead of our barbaric local dialect, we speak perfect Mandarin. This is because they speak Cantonese and are too proud and stubborn to learn the official language of the Mainland.

But these many asides lead to a disjointed narrative and cloud the story’s perspective.

When my Kindle finally came to life, I discovered that the novel is actually written in the first person. Oh, so I was wrong!

But I think I was right to feel confused.

The peculiar distancing of the first-person narrator is compounded by dialogue that at times seems stiff and formal. The Chinese dialogue has been translated into very correct English sentences and the English (and Scottish) dialogue appears to have been cleaned up by an academic hand.

The narrative itself is exceptionally well written. There is none of the sloppiness you find so often in books written by native speakers of the language in England and America.

The only section I found a little disconcerting was the prologue, which is written in the first person, present tense, and describes a dream. Probably the worst sentences in the whole novel can be found here. The language is intense, creative, symbolic and, at times, clumsy.

If you can get past these slight imperfections, you will come to writing that is crystal clear in its dissection of motives and emotions. It is uncompromising in its honesty. The descriptions of romance, friendship, academia and family life are concrete, meticulous, accurate and moving.

You will learn a lot about how it feels to be Chinese, and particularly how it feels to be a Chinese woman living in the west.

I am sure it cannot have been easy for the author to set down some of these details. I understand how painful it must have been for her to recollect events that, however much they have been fictionalised, have more than a ghostly resemblance to things that actually happened.

Lastly, I have the greatest respect for her achievement in bringing to life these people, some of whom must once have actually lived and died and left a permanent and very deep impression in the author’s heart, and many of whom must be living still. They will go on living now for all of us in this remarkable book, which is, by the way, the first part in a trilogy.

I haven’t yet managed to wrestle with a werewolf, get sucked senseless by a vampire or even tangle with a woody wood sprite BUT … that’s why we make new year’s resolutions, isn’t it? That’s why we always start every new year filled with hope and breathless anticipation. There is always something new to discover, something new to try and, best of all, something new to read.

So to usher in the new year of 2012, I would like to say thank you to all the lovely people I’ve met in 2011. And, for those of you who are writers, please take this opportunity to remind everyone of the brilliant book(s) you’ve written and where we can buy it/them. Because buying books is great and can sometimes be even more fun than reading them since you still have that undiminished thrill of heady expectation and never have to suffer the dull slog through an uninspired prologue or the damp squib of a disappointing climax, not to mention a bloated muffin top of a middle.

I always like to have a big stack by my bed. I am stuffed to the gills with soft and hard versions of exciting prospects. There’s just not enough time to read and review everything. But I love to be tempted. I’m addicted to teasers. So don’t be shy. Show me what you’ve got and please don’t make me beg.

If you are ushering in the new year with a promotional opportunity such as this on your own blog, please provide the link so some very special sexy creatures can come and shower you with praise and titillating comments.

A happy and prosperous new year to you all!