They may be both be up for a Costa, but David Mitchell and Mark Haddon are in the running to score at an entirely different kind of literary award ceremony tonight - and they're up against some stiff competition.
Yes, it's that time again. The Literary Review Bad Sex awards come but once a year, but when they climax tonight at the In and Out Club in London, subeditors across the land descend into veritable frenzy of double entendre-stuffing.
The awards are designed to highlight "unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant sex scenes in otherwise sound literary novels" (and the party also doubles up as the organ's festive bash). You can read the passages in the running for the honour here, if you can face it.
And if you're thinking of placing a bet? Well, loath as we are to suggest that you take any advice from the GU books desk, given our track record when it comes to picking winners, here's our tip.
The Literary Review likes an author to turn up to collect the "semi-abstract statue depicting sex in the 1950s". Tom Wolfe was roundly booed for failing to show the year before last (and further ridiculed for his subsequent unsportsmanlike moaning that the judges had missed the "irony" in his winning passage). So if we assume that the judges likes authors who can entertain the notion that their rude writing is under par and thus rule out the big names - Mitchell, Haddon, Will Self, Irvine Welsh - we're left with a couple of options.
Firstly, Tim Willocks's eruption-filled passage, taken from The Religion. This is a book that's bad-bad, not good-bad - described by one of our own reviewers as "a Maltese Psycho without the wit and with nasty, white supremacist undertones" - so we really don't want him to win. Anything. Not even a "semi-abstract statue".
Moving swiftly on, it's over to Iain Hollingshead, and the rather lovely "and then I'm inside her, and everything is pure white as we're lost in a commotion of grunts and squeaks, flashing unconnected images and explosions of a million little particles". It's taken from his first novel, Twentysomething. At this point we should declare a vested interest - Hollingshead is a Guardian columnist. But - more importantly, perhaps - by following a trail of links from a Literary Review writer's website in a conspiracy-theory-stylee, we see that he seems to have chums within the esteemed organ ... Cynical, us?
And here's one final tip. You can pretty much take our word for it that the author of arguably the funniest entry on this year's list (involving a spaniel, a man called Reef and the words "Reader, she bit him") is highly unlikely to show up. Odds on Thomas Pynchon, anyone?
