Bad sex award won by Christopher Bollen's phallic 'billiard rack'

Passage from novel The Destroyers singled out by judges of dubious honour for ‘going overboard in its attempts to describe the familiar in new terms’

An overenthusiastic attempt to “describe the familiar in new terms”, which led to the male genitals being portrayed as an anatomically confusing “billiard rack”, has won the American author Christopher Bollen the Literary Review’s annual Bad sex in fiction award.

Bollen’s The Destroyers, a literary thriller that Jay McInerney said “invokes the shades of Lawrence Durrell and Graham Greene”, beat titles by the bestselling Wilbur Smith and the award-winning Laurent Binet to the prize.

Related: Bad sex award 2017 shortlist: the contenders in quotes

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