There are some beautiful passages in Richard Flanagan's Man Booker prize-winning novel, but the main sex scene isn't one of them, according to a British literary magazine.
Flanagan's The Narrow Road to the Deep North - inspired by the story of Australian prisoners of war forced to work on the Burma Railway - has been shortlisted for the Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction award.
The offending passage describes an encounter between the main character, Dorrigo Evans, and his uncle's wife.
"He felt the improbable weight of her eyelash with his own; he kissed the slight, rose-coloured trench that remained from her knicker elastic, running around her belly like the equator line circling the world," Flanagan writes.
"As they lost themselves in the circumnavigation of each other, there came from nearby shrill shrieks that ended in a deeper howl.