Best of the very bad sex

If you read one book this week

The Girl Who Saved the King of Sweden by Jonas Jonasson (Fourth Estate) R213

What are the odds that Nombeko Mayeki, a Sowetan orphan who has fled South Africa with a stash of stolen diamonds, will wind up in the back of a truck with the king of Sweden and the Swedish prime minister? Nombeko, who has a thing about numbers, pegs it at one in 45766212810.

Here Jonasson proves that his best-selling debut, The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared, was no one-off fluke. His absurd cast in this fast-paced and furiously funny novel includes Chinese sisters who poison dogs, an alcoholic South African nuclear bomb engineer and a borderline psychotic who raises his twin sons as one child so that the "spare" can assassinate members of the monarchy. Ideal holiday entertainment.

The issue

Congratulations to Ben Okri for winning the Literary Review's 2014 Bad Sex award last week. In its citation, the journal said that in The Age of Magic, Okri "presents us with a Character Who Mistakes His Lover for a Lamp: 'When his hand brushed her nipple it tripped a switch and she came alight .'" Ouch. And spare a thought for the shortlisted Wilbur Smith: "He offers grammatical and anatomical pedantry - 'Her body was hairless. Her pudenda were also entirely devoid of hair.'"

Crash course

Being able to speak the language proved a big plus for journalist Howard W French, whose China's Second Continent: How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa (Alfred A Knopf) has been selected as one of this year's notable non-fiction books by the New York Times. French's fluency so impressed those he met that his subjects really opened up to him. Perhaps too much.

Here's one startlingly blunt migrant, who admits that Mozambicans were so "black" they made him uncomfortable at first: "I didn't think they were so clever, not so intelligent, and I was looking for an opportunity based on my own capabilities. Can you imagine if I had gone to America or Germany first? The people in those . places are too smart . So we had to find backward countries, poor countries that we can lead, places where we can do business, where we can manage things successfully."

French argues that Chinese migration to Africa falls within a wider tradition of foreign powers establishing spheres of economic influence here, and he believes that China's political demands of the continent will grow. However, he does make the point that if Africa fails to capitalise on its wealth for the benefit of future generations, well, then it's hardly China's fault.

The bottom line

"It's far more demoralising to work and be poor than to be unemployed and poor." - Hand to Mouth: The Truth About Being Poor in a Wealthy World by Linda Tirado (Virago)