It's Valentine's Day this week and whether you see it as the most important holiday of the year, or a total waste of time (no judgment from us, either way) what better excuse to dust off your favourite bonkbuster and revisit? And if you feel like you've already exhausted your entire Jackie Collins collection, some of our favourite authors have shared their favourites...
Grazia books - 11 February
1 of 6Alexandra Heminsley, author, broadcaster and Shelf Life columnist - The Valley of the Dolls - Jacqueline Susann
Ludicrous yet inspiring, The Valley of the Dolls presents us with deliciously trashy prose and three unforgettable heroines. Dripping with ambition - for a better life, better sex, better hair and better sleep, they are at once victims of a male environment and doggedly determined to grab what they can of it.
2 of 6Juno Dawson, columnist, screenwriter and Stonewall role model, and author of The Gender Games and Clean - Forever - Judy Blume
FOREVER details the burgeoning love between Katharine, Michael and Ralph, Michael's penis. In the midst of all the teen fiction that followed, there's a glorious simplicity to FOREVER. The whole plot is Katharine deciding to have sex; having sex and pondering the aftermath. Judy Blume understands teenage girls better than anyone else. As adults, we perhaps forget how momentous first-time sex is. I think FOREVER made a generation of young women feel seen and heard in their worries about sex.
3 of 6Dolly Alderton, columnist and author of Everything I Know About Love - I Love Dick - Chris Kraus
I love how the majority of the sex described is seen just through her specific prism of fantasy. The most radical thing about it is how uncensored her sexuality is - not polite or tame and neither is it pornographic. It's unguarded, ravenous and obsessive. I hadn't realised how little of raw, uninterrupted female sexual expression we see in popular culture; that holds zero eye contact with the male gaze. I loved the prose, the exploration of obsession and infatuation and femininity; and I loved loved loved the descriptions of bonking.
4 of 6Jojo Moyes, bestselling author and filmmaker - Riders - Jilly Cooper
RIDERS contains all my favourite teenage things - horses, arrogant, handsome men and badly behaved women - and left me with the (disappointingly unrealistic) expectation that men could bat bread rolls with unlikely bits of their anatomy.
5 of 6Harriet Evans, bestselling author of several novels including the forthcoming The Wildflowers - Lace - Shirley Conran
I bought it with the book token we all got when we left school and I didn't realise the chairman of the governors would have to present it to me on stage. True story! The looks from the parents. Shirley Conran is a goddess. It is so bloody good. It's about friendship and sex in a way that still isn't really examined today. The female characters are real, believable, fantastic women. Plus it is so glamorous and full of jaw-dropping details... and the goldfish…
6 of 6Candice Carty-Williams, author of forthcoming Queenie - Blue is the Warmest Color - Julie March
A French-adapted graphic novel about a young girl's coming of lesbian age, this is as uniquely erotic as it is dark and melancholy. Given that their term for orgasm is 'La Petite Mort' (the little death) nobody does sad but oh, so sexy like the french...'