Top ten books: good sex in fiction

Rowan Somerville is the author of two novels, The End of Sleep and this year's The Shape of Her.

For the Guardian, he named a top ten list of the best fiction about sex.

One novel on the list:

Dracula by Bram Stoker (1897)

This Victorian classic has never been out of print, spawning dozens of books, films and more recently all those camp US teen dramas where sexual passion is faintly camouflaged as bloodlust. The original is a superb gothic tale of repressed sexuality and the savagery of its release. Strange today, that a society can gaze calmly at surgically enhanced teenagers ripping out each others throats and gorging on blood but one naked breast in the American Superbowl and moral panic erupts.

Read about the other entries on the list.

Dracula is one of Arthur Phillips' six favorite books set in places that their authors never visited and one of Anthony Browne's six best books. It is one of the books on John Mullan's lists of ten of the best wolves in literature and ten of the best mirrors in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue