Man Booker Prize 1992 / The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

MAN BROOKER PRIZE

Booker club: The English Patient

Michael Ondaatje's novel was a joint winner of the 1992 prize, but its brilliance is such you can understand why Barry Unsworth's has been rather eclipsed

Ralph Fiennes in the film of The English Patient.

Photograph: Phil Bray/AP

Sam Jordison
Fri 4 Mar 2011

In 1992, for only the second time in its history, the Booker Prize was divided between two books: Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Barry Unsworth's Sacred Hunger. The English Patient has been translated into 40 languages, has sold more than 1m copies, and turned into an Oscar-winning film. Scared Hunger has ... well ... have you read it?

All of which is not to diminish Sacred Hunger. I haven't read it either (that's for next time) and have no reason to doubt the competition was hard fought. By all accounts the judges were bitterly and passionately divided about the books: the decision was made just 30 minutes before the ceremony, and the chair, Victoria Glendinning, characterised the awarding of the prize as a "necessary nonsense".

Even so, viewed through the reverse telescope of history it seems surprising that Ondaatje's novel had to share the prize. Especially since it's so damn good.

In case you're one of the few people who've neither read the book nor seen the film, The English Patient centres around an Italian villa towards the end of the second world war, where four variously damaged characters try to come to terms with the past. The titular patient isn't, in fact, English. He's a Hungarian desert explorer called Laslo Almasy (very loosely based on a real man) who was burned black after a plane crash on the Libya-Egypt border. He spends the book on what he knows to be his deathbed, recounting the story of his doomed love affair with a married woman, Katharine Clifton. This story is extracted by a former thief and spy, Caravaggio, who uses his knowledge of morphine addiction (developed after Axis torturers removed his thumbs) to make the patient garrulous. Almasy is also tended by a young nurse, Hana, who is herself a victim of war, shell-shocked and grieving for her father's death under arms. Finally, there is Kip, a Sikh bomb disposal expert who becomes Hana's lover and the patient's admirer and friend.

The character of the English patient may be sophisticated, adult and troubled, but there's plenty of Indiana Jones in his archaeological discoveries, incredible journeys, wartime intrigues, and even the accident that spills him from his plane wearing "an antlered hat of fire". Then there's Caravaggio's thieving and spying, Kip's bomb disposal and Hana the beautiful nurse ... This is a book imbued with the spirit of Boys' Own Adventure. It makes sense that it made such a good film – even if the most impressive feature of the book, Ondaatje's prose, can't be caught on celluloid.

Much has been said about the richness of Ondaatje's writing, the sensuousness of his physical descriptions and his poet's gift for using well-timed silences and ellipses to speak volumes. All that's true. But the thing that impressed me most as I read the book this time around is its hard centre. It may come wrapped in musky perfume, but Ondaatje's prose could go a few rounds with Hemingway and probably knock out Kipling, too.

The latter is a comparison the author audaciously invites. At one point Hana reads the patient an extract from Kim:

"He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zamzamah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher – the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that 'fire-breathing dragon', hold the Punjab; for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror's loot."

He interrupts her to say:

"Read him slowly, dear girl, you must read Kipling slowly. Watch carefully where the commas fall so you can discover the natural pauses. He is a writer who used pen and ink. He looked up from the page a lot, I believe, stared through his window and listened to birds, as most writers who are alone do. Some do not know the names of birds, though he did. Your eye is too quick and North American. Think about the speed of his pen. What an appalling, barnacled old first paragraph it is otherwise."

It's a fairly incidental and subdued passage in the greater scheme of things. There are far brighter pyrotechnics in the book. But it's a good example of how hard Ondaatje's writing works. It works firstly because it's spot on: try and read that quote with and without commas. It works thematically: immediately you start thinking about empire and its impact, about the Orient, about adventure, about how much Kipling himself lost in war. It works because it illuminates the polymath English patient: he's just the sort of man to have an opinion on how to read Kipling – and to be right about it. It works – craftily – as a guide to reading Ondaatje himself: The English Patient too should be taken slowly and with careful attention to rhythm. And so it is throughout the book. You get the sense that every word is straining and bursting with meaning. Every word has been made to labour as well as delight. Everything is turned up to 11. Everything, in short, works.

Or almost everything. I should also note that some of the novel has come in for criticism. Most notably, there have been objections to the way the book ends, with the detonation of the bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some have said that it seems rather tacked on – and it's true that the bombs do have a strange and unsettling impact at the culmination of the narrative. Personally, I felt that to be true to the brutal way the bombs cut short the war, but it isn't an easy termination.

There has also been controversy – particularly in the US – about the following remark: "They would never have dropped such a bomb on a white nation." It's certainly uncomfortable reading. Possibly because it's too true. Possibly because it's impossible to prove either way. There is one important point to make about it though – and that is that Ondaatje himself does not present it as a simple black and white statement of fact. It is not Kip – as most critics seem to think – who owns the line. Caravaggio says it as he attempts to explain why Kip has found the nuclear bomb so upsetting. Yet Kip's horror can just as much be ascribed to his role as a sapper as to his race. He's spent the whole war trying to prevent explosions. He's risked everything time and again to save maybe a few hundred Allied lives – and now the Allies have killed millions at a stroke. Actually, the line is just another example of how everything Ondaatje writes has depth and ambiguity that rewards slow reading and careful thought - just another demonstration of his meticulous talent. This is a book to be savoured, re-read and remembered. It is wonderful. I'm going to be very curious to see how Sacred Hunger measures up.

THE GUARDIAN

Man Booker Prize

1978 The sea, the Sea by Iris Murdoch

1980 Rites of Passage by William Golding

1987 Moon Tiger by Penelope Livery

1988 Oscar and Lucinda by Peter Carey

1992 The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje

1996 Last Orders by Graham Swift

Warlight by Michael Ondaatje review – a novel shrouded in secrecy

A boy alone in postwar London is drawn into shadowy worlds in this suspenseful yet frustrating story from the English Patient author

Andrew Motion
Sat 16 jun 2018

Michael Ondaatje likes writing about uncertainties, mysteries and doubts, not quite with the Keatsian ambition of resisting “any irritable reaching after fact and reason”, but because he relishes the idea of thoughts being fluid and characters essentially unknowable. Hence the tactics of his best-known novel The English Patient, joint winner of the 1992 Booker prize, in which a potentially very dramatic set of circumstances is generally delivered to the reader by means of hint and indirection: scenes are habitually softened by half-lights, and all action and most reflection are slowed by rich (some would say overwritten) prose. Hence, too, the procedures of his other novels, in which similarly striking narrative potential is mostly kept in check, or actually stifled. I’m thinking of the lurking crime drama and love drama that remain in the background of his shipboard story The Cat’s Table, for instance; or the absences, stoppages and indirections that prevent Anil’s Ghost – set in war-torn Sri Lanka – from becoming a straightforward war story.

Perhaps all this has something to do with Ondaatje’s less well-known life as a poet (he has published nearly twice as many collections of poetry as he has novels). Paradoxical as it might sound, in this alternative existence he often renders hard facts and moments of explosive action more directly than he does in his fiction: think of his early verse novel The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. But why? Maybe because in fiction Ondaatje feels compelled by the form itself to deal with significant events (bomb disposal, prisoners in cages, civil-war murders) but is faintly embarrassed by the risk of overextrapolating them – and so making them seem banal – in the comparatively roomy spaces of prose. This means that he ends up blurring or disguising everything. Whatever the reason, there exists at the centre of his imagination, and therefore of his work as a whole, a tussle between the urge to reveal and the instinct to suppress and/or conceal. Characteristically, it manifests and seeks to resolve itself in a profound attraction to secrets.

In Ondaatje’s new novel, his eighth, his appetite for imprecision is stronger than ever (the title itself shrouds the action in a kind of twilight: the dimmed warlight in the wake of the blitz). It opens in 1945 with the departure of 14-year-old Nathaniel Williams’s father to Singapore, ostensibly to work for Unilever, and with the disappearance of his mother, Rose, soon afterwards – probably but not certainly to join her husband overseas. This double abandonment leaves Nathaniel and his elder sister Rachel in the care of a mystery man they call The Moth, who is apparently acting on their parents’ orders, and soon allows them to swap their boarding schools for day schools and so share in the life that he has instigated in their London home. In a swirl of glimpses, one figure at least becomes clear to Nathaniel, even as his nature remains obscure: a character whose given name eventually turns out to be Norman Marshall, but who is known to our narrator as “the Pimlico Darter” – “the best welterweight north of the river”.

 Nathaniel, who even at this tender age is convinced that life is best understood as a scattering of fragments, soon finds himself drawn into even more shadowy worlds. Working during his out-of-school hours in the laundry room of the Criterion hotel, he consorts with Mr Nkoma, whose elaborate storytelling confirms the unreliability of things. When his sister Rachel joins the theatre, she vanishes into a realm of make-believe; when Nathaniel works with the Pimlico Darter on the river he enters a world of mists and mellow obscurity; when he finds a girlfriend she is as shadowy in name and nature as the empty house in which they habitually meet; and when his mother eventually returns to London, there’s no clear sense of what’s she’s been up to – except that it has something to do with the war, and has landed her in such danger that she has to pack Nathaniel off to school first in America, then in the north of England, before they cautiously settle under one roof in a remote part of Suffolk.

So deep is the shading of motive and 

consequence, that it’s hard not to feel a degree of impatience

Ondaatje is a skilfully deliberate writer, and these secrets inevitably generate a certain degree of suspense. Over the years his style has purified a good deal, so elements that overdecorate the prose of The English Patient are largely absent here. But so regular is the pattern of uncertainty in this opening section of the novel, and so deep is the shading of motive and consequence, that it’s hard not to feel a degree of impatience. This feeling is compounded in the second section, in which we are transported to Suffolk in 1959 to watch the now 28-year-old Nathaniel buying a cottage from the elderly Linette Malakite – who, it turns out, was formerly married to Sam Malakite, another uncertain sort of fellow, who was deputed by Nathaniel’s mother to look after him during their previous rural sojourn.

Because Linette is no longer of sound mind and Sam is dead, Nathaniel makes very little progress in discovering the story of his mother’s life, or her reasons for treating him as she did. Neither do his own memories help much. As he reminisces about affable chess games and such like, he recalls feeling that his mother was in danger – but what sort, and why, remains beyond his ken. Actual research into her past is slightly more rewarding. When Ondaatje – with an audible clashing of plot gears – sends Nathaniel to work for the Foreign Office, we are allowed to learn what his mother was up to during the war, and that she may have been implicated in some nasty business that meant her life was still at risk in peacetime.

Except we don’t really feel the threat on our pulses, since by this stage of the novel we’re either too used to living among shadows, or at risk of finding these continuing evasions rather absurd, because so predictable. Also predictable, but nevertheless a relief, is the degree of clarification that comes in the final section of the novel, where a funeral visitor – a “ghost-like” and “secretive” character named Marsh Felon (Ondaatje has always had a penchant for weird and wonderful names) – is able to shed some light. Yet, of course, even now “there is confusion and even uncertainty about what may have happened, what may have been said”.

This knowledge brings Nathaniel, and is meant to bring readers, a sense of resolution or feeling of closure, which is bolstered by a catch-up meeting with The Darter in the novel’s closing pages. And in certain obvious respects it does round things out. But the problem remains. Rather than closing the book convinced that psychological insights have been generated by Jamesian withholdings, we might equally well feel that characters have been flattened by our simply not knowing enough about them, and that our interest in their doings is diminished by the same means.

• Andrew Motion’s Essex Clay is published by Faber. Warlight is published by Cape.

THE GUARDIAN

Jon McGregor / The First Punch

THE FIRST PUNCH

by

Jon McGregor

T

he first punch is a shock. We’re taking a short cut across where the old steelworks used to be, that huge old strip of land between the river and the canal with the motorway flying somewhere way overhead and down here it’s almost quiet. Silver birch trees and rowan bushes bursting up through the concrete foundations. Thistles with bright purple flower heads, stray yellow rapeseed flown in from the fields outside town, those white flowers with the petals like trumpets that wind their way across the ground and up round anything they can get their feelers on to. Butterflies and dragonflies and the evening-song of birds that have lived here for centuries. He says, you wouldn’t have thought this was a foundry just five years ago would you. Everywhere there are scattered lumps of machinery, lost cogs and gearwheels, stacks of plate, coils of wire. He says, the way these trees come back you wouldn’t believe it. He was one of the last workers to be laid off here, and he can still point out where the steel was smelted and poured and formed; the outlines of the old sheds and foundry-halls spread out across the whole site like a giant blueprint, ankle-high walls rearing up to hold a tall window frame, a door hanging off its hinges. But mostly there are trees and bushes and birdlife, and it’s a good place to walk on a long summer’s evening with the sky stretching hazy blue over our heads, a couple of pints swimming through us and one or other of us talking quietly now and again.

My other life / Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor

My other life: 

Jon McGregor

Jon McGregor envisages a world of infinite possibilities but opts instead for this reality

I

n my other life, the laws of physics are different. All decisions are reversible, and all options remain open. In a restaurant, I eat anything on the menu and then change my mind. Stuck in traffic, I take the alternative route I was considering 30 miles ago. Disappointed with my career, I apply for a different degree at a better university; go to all those parties and do more revision for my exams. Dying of cancer, I give up smoking before I even began.

I have a friend, in this life, who would like to live that way. Haunted by what she thinks are past mistakes and errors of judgment, she longs to go back for another chance. Just once more, she says.

I've tried explaining that my other life isn't much fun, but she doesn't believe me. Imagine, I say, when you can revoke any decision you have to make, how meaningless it becomes. How weightless. In my other life, I tell her, there are no rewards for making the right choice.

I've made a choice, and I'm sticking to it. I choose this life, with all its regrets, mistakes and failures; all its hard-earned triumphs and joys. I hope my friend will choose this life as well, one day. There aren't any others.

Jon McGregor's latest novel, Even the Dogs, is published by Bloomsbury

THE GUARDIAN

2010

033 My other life / Jon McGregor

034 My other Life / Maggie Gee

My other life / Maggie Gee

Maggie Gee the writer: not to be confused with Maggie Gee the aviator or dog obedience trainer.
Photograph by Sarah Lee

My other life: 

Maggie Gee

Maggie Gee was an aviator during the second world war – or so the literary festival seemed to think

Sun 14 Feb 2010

A

ll I want you to know about my real self is in my new memoir, My Animal Life – the ups and downs of love and writing. But how can I control my other lives, flaunting themselves in cyberspace? My first inkling that all was not well was when I was booked by a literary festival in the same year as Tony Benn. "And we've put your photo on our cover next to his," said the amiable PR on the telephone. How excited I was – until the brochure arrived: there was Tony Benn, yes, but he was flanked by a photo of a Chinese woman in helmet and goggles. Thank you, Google Image: a second world war aviator named Maggie Gee had dive-bombed her way on to my space on the cover. Yes, I felt dejected at first but at least I had turned out brave and pioneering, not just the cautious passenger I am used to, willing the pilot not to crash, from my seat near the emergency exit. There is also Maggie Gee the Californian restaurateur, beckoning with a life I would have enjoyed – seafood, sunlight, swimming-pool afternoons; and several Utah Maggie Gees, probably Mormons with tribes of children. Given the joy my one daughter provides, Utah is the home of my unlived wishes. But Maggie Gee the dog obedience trainer… no, there I draw the line.

My Animal Life is published by Telegram

THE GUARDIAN

2010
033 My other life / Jon McGregor
034 My other Life / Maggie Gee

John Tenniel / Alice

John Tenniel
1989

ALICE

by John Tenniel

My hero / Sir John Tenniel by Chris Riddell

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson / Review by Julie Myerson

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by Jeanette Winterson – review

Jeanette Winterson's account of her abusive upbringing by an adoptive mother and her journey to find her real family is by turns hilarious and harrowing

Julie Myerson

Sunday 6 November 2011 00.05 GMT

J

eanette Winterson once asked her adoptive mother – stringently immortalised in her first novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – why they couldn't have books in the house. "The trouble with a book is that you never know what's in it until it's too late," answered the peerless Mrs Winterson. As advertisements for reading go, it's pretty seductive. But it also happens to be wonderfully true of this vivid, unpredictable and sometimes mind-rattling memoir. You start it expecting one thing – a wry retake of her working-class gothic upbringing – and come out having been subjected to one of the more harrowing and candid investigations of mid-life breakdown I've ever read. This book is definitely of the sort that Mrs Winterson feared most: truths that most of us find hard to face, explored in a way that disturb, challenge, upset and inspire. And so yes, by the time I realised what it was really about and what it was going to do to me, it was definitely far "too late".

Jeanette Winterson was adopted as a baby by a couple who had been hoping for a boy. An evangelical Pentecostal Christian who possibly had never had sex with her husband ("They're his only pleasure," she said of the three packs of Polo mints she gave him every week), Mrs Winterson weighed 20 stone and kept a revolver in the kitchen drawer. If someone knocked at the door she "shoved a poker through the letter box". As Winterson very memorably puts it, she "did not have a soothing personality".

When her adoptive daughter upset her – inevitably and often – she'd say that the devil had led them to the "wrong crib". The young Jeanette was frequently deprived of food or locked out of the house or into the coal hole. Secretly, she began to read. But when her mother discovered the stash of books, she burned them. Lonely and bereft, she fell in love. But when her mother discovered her in bed with a girl, she took her to church and subjected her to three days of praying and beatings – not to mention a chilling attempted sexual assault from one of the elders – to "exorcise" the evil spirits.

Finally, after starting another relationship with a girl – and this time facing a stony ultimatum from Mrs Winterson – Jeanette ran away from home. She slept in a friend's car, and then in a sympathetic teacher's spare room. The teacher encouraged her to apply to Oxford. The rest is history.

Many years later – and Winterson admits to skipping over the large middle chunk of her life – a long-term relationship with the theatre director Deborah Warner comes to an end and Winterson goes "mad". Realising that it is, in part at least, her own inability to balance and temper her craving for reassurance that has caused the split, she has what amounts to a serious breakdown and attempts suicide. A little later, and by now in love with the therapist Susie Orbach – who seems in some way to be the angel of stability and calm that Winterson deserves – she feels safe enough to start to follow the trail that has always both tempted and frightened her: the one that might lead to her birth mother. Pages, months and many legal and emotional tussles later, it does.

And here's where this book – which up to this point had been funny enough to make me laugh out loud more times than is advisable on the No 12 bus – turns into something raw and unnerving. It turns into something you need to read in private, simply because you can't tell what will happen next or what you'll feel about it (Mrs W, you were right all along). The idea at its core, that it's possible to get roughly halfway through your life and find that the things you thought you'd dealt with, laughed off, survived, have come back to wallop you hard – endanger you, even – feels urgent and universal. And Winterson, with her fierce impulse for honesty, seems determined to unpack it all at some personal cost.

All of this, you realise, is still very recent – it's current affairs, not history – and it involves real people. Some have their identities disguised and some don't. But if Winterson is open about others, she's also (typically) unsparing of herself, heartbreakingly so in fact. Her analysis of events feels swift and direct – barely processed at times. It does not make for an easy journey for the reader. It is very hard, for instance, to watch someone who clearly loves being alive as much as she does, deciding almost coldly to let herself die. And her response to meeting her real family – comically tentative, wary, needy, yet in crucial ways underwhelmed – is also bravely told. You catch yourself, breath held, desperately wanting there to be something good in it for her.

This book is a gamble, but then that's perhaps one of the less surprising things about it: Winterson has always been a risk-taking writer, instinctively tempering her own slightly bolshie directness with humour, compassion and kindness. All the same, I found myself feeling oddly protective of all these good people, the author included – hoping that their presence on these pages won't make them too vulnerable, hoping there won't be repercussions for anyone (hoping, in short, that the Daily Mail will stay away).

Of course, one of the book's queasiest ironies – and one you sense Winterson is fully aware of – is that it was Mrs Winterson who made her into a writer. By attempting to stunt her daughter's emotional and imaginative growth with fear and religion, she succeeded in doing the exact opposite. She created someone who learned to live in her head, and to love, trust and remember words: "Fuck it, I can write my own," was young Jeanette's thought as she watched her beloved books burn.

If this were a novel, you might leave it like that. But real life is a baggy old thing, never so straightforward, and one of this memoir's bizarrest moments – and most glorious contradictions – is the one where Mrs Winterson reads Jane Eyre aloud to a seven-year-old Jeanette, cunningly changing the ending as she reads, to have the hapless governess marry the sanctimonious St John Rivers. Megalomaniac passion-killer she might have been, but here was a woman who was clearly excited by narrative, who cared how things turned out, who was – surely? – fascinated by those unpredictable and dangerous things called books.

The triumph of this memoir is that, with understanding, intelligence and a verbal agility that leaves you in awe, Winterson dares, in the strangest way, to celebrate this. In fact its many sparkling contradictions are what make me love it most. As Winterson says when she realises that she doesn't like hearing her birth mother criticise Mrs Winterson: "She was a monster, but she was my monster."

THE GUARDIAN

Illustration by T.A.

After Fifty Shades: five authors offer their ripostes

Friday 6 July 2012 22.55 BST

AL Kennedy

He breathed along the inside of her thigh,

rising, taking it slow. She could, in fact, feel him smiling – there was that warmth in the occasional brush of his lips. He wouldn't kiss her, she knew, until the ache for it was almost unbearable.

She answered him by stroking his neck, his head, the pale skin of his shoulders, each place so much more delicate and electric than anything her husband could offer, so much stronger.

"Do you read?" he murmured, the words running hotly up to catch where she wanted his kisses, where she was ready, open for his open mouth.

"Do I read?" Her voice sounded younger, more confident – as if she were the woman she'd intended to become, someone not married to Kevin, someone with no kids, someone beautiful. "Yes, when I have time." She was someone sensual, her skin being finally woken and properly explored. She was a woman rocking at the start of an afternoon's love, already impatient.

He licked her, teasing. "I bet you read. I bet you read smut." He licked again, his tongue clever, amused, tender. Then he withdrew. "They say women respond more to written pornography." His hands now, stroking, playing in from the rise of her hips, while he eased back a touch to study her. She'd told him she liked it when he looked, really looked. "Men like pictures, but you want a story and characters and emotions with your sex – then fit it in your Kindle and read it on the bus. Naughty. I bet you don't even blush. Think of all those publishers, baby – sitting back happy, knowing they can give you what you want. Like me." He grinned, lowered his head again, began in earnest.

He wasn't wrong.

Jenny Colgan

'I can't," I said.

Every sinew in me was straining hard; I could barely keep kneeling. I could feel the sweat bursting on my forehead and coursing down my back. My mouth wouldn't close.

"You must," he said. His voice sounded gruff, his eyes still fixed on my breasts as he continued the fierce stroking and caressing. They were so tight; straining over the top of the corset as if they wanted to burst. The nipples were utterly rigid. I could hardly believe my huge breasts – the bane of my life, the subject of catcalls and fumbles since I was fourteen years old, until I had wanted to hide away in shame, swathed in huge jumpers that made me look like a walking tent – had become so responsive.

But here they were; fierce and proud, high and so, so tight and full. They were being teased and tormented until I couldn't bear it, as if they had been made for this; and here was I on all fours, my entire body raging in a fever, although he hadn't yet even touched me anywhere else.

"You're not leaving," he had said, casually, earlier, and my head had whipped round, half in fear, half still slightly hysterical at the height of the heels he wanted me to wear; seven inches of black, shiny patent leather, ending in a point that could core an apple, with an impossible arch that left me practically en pointe.

"How am I supposed to walk in those?"

"You're not," he said, as if surprised by the question. "You're meant to fuck in them. And you're not leaving until I've taught you how to come properly."

He paused and flashed that wolfish grin I'd seen before. I looked at the immaculate black leather men's gloves he had brought with some trepidation.

"I'd cancel any other plans you had for the weekend."

Alastair Campbell

I felt like an adolescent boyfriend

being taken back to a new girlfriend's house as we went up in the lift. I didn't want to stand too close to her as it carried us to our floor, even after the intimacy of our walk. She was clearly feeling the same sense of excitement tinged with unease. She even said "Here we are then" as she fished her swipe card from her bag.

Advertisement

"Is this the moment when I ask if you want to come in for a coffee?" she said, smiling.

She was standing about four feet away from me. I looked long and hard, trying to read those eyes. Was she still pulling me in, or pushing me away? Then, before I knew it, I was kissing her.

"Are you crazy!" she said, drawing away. "Not here!" She unlocked the door to her room and pulled me in.

It was dark inside. The change of atmosphere froze us momentarily, as if we suddenly realised the enormity of what we were doing. Maya walked across the room to turn on a lamp. Then she sat down on the side of the bed and kicked off her shoes.

I walked over and stood by her. I held my hand towards her. She took it, and I sat down beside her. Then I bent my head towards her ear.

"You said I was the best friend you've ever had," I whispered. "Can I be the best lover too?"

Jeanette Winterson

Subway: 8am.

June rain outside and heat underground steam the tunnels like a sauna. The doors open into a carriage of vertical bodies. Smell of too little washing and too much cologne. Like Paris in the nineteenth century.

The guy next to me is young and skinny. He's jammed forward against a black woman with an enviable rump. No Photoshop, no collagen implants. The real thing. Big.

My eyes are idling, shoes, bags, haircuts, clothes. Then I focus.

The guy is moving himself against the woman, using the push and sway of the train. She's talking full speed to her friend and fanning her face with a magazine. She doesn't seem to notice what he's doing. He's holding on to the overhead rail, long white arm, clean shirt. But the little thrusts are unmistakable.

The train jerks into the next stop and the doors crash open. He pulls away. She gets out. He catches my eye. He blushes like a Shakespearean boy actor playing a girl. Cute. And his penis is hard through his jeans.

Advertisement

The doors close again. I could have moved away. Instead I turned my back to him and leaned against him, inching my hips so that he could push his cock against the soft crack of my ass. He put his arm round me – stronger than I expected from a skinny guy – he pulled me as tight in as he could get. Too much material, but who cares? I love the feel of him like an electric torch. I feel lit up. I haven't had sex for about 3 months. I'm not having sex now, but I'm having something better; feeling sexy is better than sex. My mouth is full of saliva and my ordinary everyday office knickers are wet.

He comes.

The doors judder open. I have already missed my stop. He gets out. He says "Same time tomorrow morning. Carriage 4."

At work I go straight to the loo and touch myself till I orgasm, standing up, the picture of us in my mind. It's the best come I've had for a long time – alone or with anyone.

Tomorrow I won't wear knickers.

by Will Self

He was angry with me – I could tell

And his normally smooth face became contorted and red, with deep creases suggesting that he had been lying face down on the world for some time, inhaling its earthy dours. He was my boss – and I associated this with all the authority that was missing from my life, all the firm, masculine, commanding authority that I needed to both subdue my restless spirit and rouse my deepest passions. He was my boss – and when, in his anger at my failure to adequately collate the minutes from last week's interdepartmental steering meeting, he stamped his beautifully shod foot (Church's or possibly even Lobb's) on mine … I orgasmed at once, a nerve-shattering orgasm that curled my hair and curdled the low-fat yoghurt drink that was sitting on a nearby desk.

• Written, in order, by AL Kennedy, Jenny Colgan, Alastair Campbell, Jeanette Winterson and Will Self

THE GUARDIAN