This year’s volume encompasses some of the best short stories I managed to come across published during the course of 2002 in a variety of places. There are familiar names for veteran readers of the series (all previous volumes are still in print and available, so go and complete your set and improve your sex life accordingly!), as well as new discoveries, many of whom, I hope, will become future regulars and will graduate to doing books of their own one day.

The stories hail from Great Britain, the USA, Canada, Australia and France and all evoke a rainbow of emotions and sexual feelings with talent and empathy to spare. There is still too much erotica that comes in the form of pseudo readers’ letters describing a particular sexual encounter or ersatz poetic memories attempting to raise the mythic consciousness of a past tryst, but the majority of the authors here transcend these bonds and treat their characters with humour or even darkness, and hence make their fictional creatures of flesh, blood and genitals even more believable. That is the art of erotic writing at its best.

So, get ready for an exciting ride with some of the dirtiest and shrewdest minds in the business, and explore combinations, positions, variations and possibilities beyond even your wildest imagination. And, should you need reassurance, no bedsheets were harmed during the writing of this book.

Maxim Jakubowski

The Two Hellos by Michel Faber

She didn’t phone him directly after she got off the coach, because she was hungry and her bum was very sore. She phoned him about an hour later, after she’d had some breakfast and wandered around the city for a while.

“Hello?” she said, into a public telephone receiver that was cold and damp with other people’s breath.

“Yes?” he said back, having no idea, apparently, whose voice it was – as always.