I first read this short story collection in the long summer before my A-levels, and I couldn’t believe my luck. Elsewhere, I was irritated by the long ruminative emails, but when it comes to young intelligent beautiful people having a very specific kind of intense, self-aware sex, Rooney’s writing is unbeatable. But it’s the more recent Beautiful World, Where Are You, which follows two of the author’s signature on-and-off couples, in which Rooney’s writing about sex is probably at its best. When the TV adaptation of Rooney’s Normal People was released during lockdown, the 41 minutes of sex scenes were discussed at length. I became consumed by this novel as the couple become consumed by each other, growing more intimate as the hazy London summers go on: “The arm which isn’t trapped between her body and yours stretches towards her, and she pulls it across her body like a blanket, curling in tight.” The unnamed lovers, a photographer and a dancer, talk and touch and sleep in the same bed well before they finally give in to desire. More slow-burning passion is found in one of 2021’s most celebrated debuts, Azumah Nelson’s elegant boy-meets-girl tale set in late 00s London. Through Therese, Carol is presented to us as impossibly sexy but always slightly out of reach, creating the perfect conditions for desire to build. As a reader you know it is all going to go wrong – homosexuality was illegal in 1950s New York, the novel’s setting, and ultimately the sex scene we wait so long for threatens to ruin Carol’s chances of gaining custody of her daughter – but Highsmith has you completely under her spell, and you can’t help but root for this ill-fated couple. More commonly known as Carol, this tale of aspiring set designer Therese, who falls in love with an older woman, is a masterclass in sexual tension.
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