The best sensual literary fiction (that doesn’t leave out the good stuff)

Circling the Sun is based on the true story of Beryl Markham, a young Englishwoman who became the first person to fly across the Atlantic from England to North America.

We follow her adventures through Kenya as she’s abandoned by her mother, learns how to raise and race horses with her father, then becomes a pilot flying across the Kenyan plains.

The story’s central arc is her sensual awakening to men, her stumblings and fallings, her love for explorer Denis Finch Hatton, and the ways she struggles to make peace with her desire and her individualist, fiercely independent womanhood.

Set in the 1920s and 1930s, this is a truly literary and arousing tale. I love sensuality that doesn’t have to struggle too hard to find its physical touch—and this book does that. It’s a viscerally-told journey—in life and in love, in the arc we all must face as independent women to find our way.

It’s similar to my short story book, in that the sensuality is grounded in the literary interiority of adult steps taken which have gone good and bad; the reconnaissance and healing that’s so often required of our hearts to overcome, to look, to find, to see, and to accept.  

This is a delightfully easy-on-the-heart book about a small group of women in depression-era Kentucky who deliver library books on packhorses to the backward and sometimes unfriendly residents of a small mining community.

The bonds they make as women, living just outside the bounds of what society wants from them, illuminate the unfairness of what their town has imposed: a young British bride who is disillusioned when her new mining-baron’s-son husband won’t make love to her and finds her attempts at intimacy detestable; a feisty woman who’s in love with a good man, but won’t marry for fear of losing her independent choices; a young woman who incurred a limp from an accident, whose overprotective parents have kept her too close but who’s dying to have her own life.

As each woman climbs the isolated horse trails and backwoods to bring much-needed books to waiting children and isolated miners’ families, they face the prejudice of the mining baron’s controlling grip on the town—his bigotry and fear that books will give his put-down workers legs to stand on and minds of their own; that women in “his” town will end up having a voice.

His controlling, meanspirited acts nearly break the women, but with a small, fierce group of loyal townsfolk who love them, they finally find their way. What I loved about this book is the feeling of women-taking-on-their-own-lives-against-prejudice, and the theme that, no matter what the uphill battle, love will find a way.

The sensuality is mildly arousing (I usually like my sensuality more descriptive and in-the-room), but the characterizations carry the need and the yearning very well.

The heart-openings are somehow surprising but still inevitably fulfilling; the pairings are foiled and then not; the healings and the falling into another’s arms feel right and good and grounded in real life.

Anthropology of an American Girl is the beautiful tale of Eveline, who lives on Long Island with her barely-making it divorced mom in a wealthy Hamptons town in the late 1970s and 1980s.

It’s a coming-of-age story of finding her independence and need, best described in her own musings: she reveals that her parents loved her but were unaware of her need in the world to be shepherded and helped; to be supported.

They needed her to be instantly independent, even as a teenager, but that didn't make it so; because they didn’t have the bandwidth to see she needed direction, didn’t mean she knew where she was going.

Living through her love of a working-class boxer—a true love that she can’t quite put aside, even as he leaves her for a career—then moving in with a man she’s settled for—a hip, rich, self-centered man that she’s let herself fall in with—she finds she still must search her soul.

What makes for a grown-up woman’s choices? What’s right in the face of uphill circumstances that seem to have no solution but plague the heart anyway?

The arc of the story illuminates how she comes back to her original heart—the truth of what she thought she didn’t know, then found she did—until she makes a choice for her own true self.

It's the story of how we—and—and the literary characters who mirror us—come to know our real self: our heart, yearnings, longings, want, need—all of it—and how we find the courage to take steps on that path, and keep walking.

Laurie Colwin is by far my favorite fiction writer. She died in 1992 at the age of 48, and Goodbye Without Leaving is one of my all-time favorite books of hers.

In it, Geraldine Coleshares—a privileged graduate student who is unmoved by her insulated and expectation-laden world—goes on the road as backup singer for Ruby Shakely and the Shakettes—an Ike and Tina Turner-type rock and roll band.

Her parents are horrified and will barely speak to her when she calls them from the road, but there’s nothing she loves more than to stand on stage in a day-glow fringed dress, singing her heart out.

When love finds her in the form of a straight-ahead lawyer who adores her and knows every rock n roll and rhythm and blues artist from the last century, she grudgingly lets him in, and though she knows she loves him, she resists marriage at every signpost.

When Ruby Shakely finally makes the big time and lets her go, she settles into marriage, but with a twist and a tryst. The unlikeliness of all her choices—like all of Colwin’s characters—makes her lift off the page in heartfelt recognition. I try, in my own writing, to find the richness Colwin finds in her characterizations.

In my book of stories, the character Ponty Bayswater makes this kind of choice when he chooses a late-in-life love that upends and then affirms the years he lived before his wife died; Gil, too, in the story Leaving Lefty, leaves his cruel boyfriend and the high-fashion world of New York City for kindness and love. It’s a phenomenal thing to take a reader on a real-to-the-touch human journey, and I love this Laurie Colwin book for doing just that.

This book is one of a four-part Pride and Prejudice sequel series that continues the romantic lives of Elizabeth Bennet and Fitzwilliam Darcy into their sex lives and family life.

It is, absolutely, an adult romp, and brilliantly written. Make no mistake, there are tons of sequels to Pride and Prejudice, but most only achieve wispy attempts at vanilla romance. If you love sensuality, these are the books to read.

The reason Jane Austen’s stories are is stellar is this: she knows how to build tension. Just like in love, she starts building a conflict, a distance between two hearts that has obstacle after obstacle to overcome, then teases us with little bits of promise, dashes our hopes, then raises the stakes and takes us to the edge of what we can stand, then lets us have a taste.

It takes the whole book to give us romantic fulfillment, and her works are good lessons for all of us in this modern-day era of quick romantic attachments. [please lose all else in this sentence.

No. There is no substitute, Austen is saying, for sussing out someone’s character. For finding out, over time—months and sometimes years—who will be devoted.

But as author Linda Berdoll has pointed out, Austen’s books stop just short of getting in bed. And so, in Berdoll’s books, Elizabeth and Darcy do it.

They make love. They have great sex. They have terrific romps. But the magic of Berdoll’s storytelling is that she uses the British vernacular of the historical time to describe sex: you’ll never read a modern-day slang word in her mix; you’ll never read anything harsh or crass, but you will be taken on a hot, vivid sexual journey.

That’s exactly what I try to do in my own fiction. I don’t leave out the good parts. I don’t want to—as an author—fade to a view of the lamp. No skipping the good parts! The naked moments are the payoff to the built-up tension. It’s land of adult intimacy.

Not all writers like to write sensuality, but I love it because sensuality is the divine realm of our adulthood. It’s not our childhood, or even our teen years when sex was awakening in us.

It’s the land of our search for heartfelt, true, devoted, inner-thigh trembling, yearning love. These books by Linda Berdoll have all of that, and I adore them.