This anthology could have developed in many different ways – sex and death are the daily fodder of the tabloids, after all. In their brief yet earnestly breathless introduction, Sarah Hall and Peter Hobbs speak of the two as "our governing drives" (one wants to quibble: can death be a "drive"?) and how combining them with the short-story form is "like gorgeous and terrible suitors, Eros and Thanatos in coitus behind closed doors".
But the stories are the thing here, and they have brought together a diverse and high-calibre mix of 20 writers from around the world, including Yiyun Li, Ali Smith, Ben Marcus, Alexander MacLeod, Lynn Coady, Petina Gappah, Alan Warner, Australians Robert Drewe and Ceridwen Dovey, and a translation of Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel.
The parameters are invigoratingly wide, considering that "Without sex, you wouldn't have death – well, you wouldn't have anything, would you", as the adulterous undertaker observes in Carmel Bird's novel Family Skeleton. The settings range from Petina Gappah's African ladies' hair salon to Hobbs' bleakly futurist fake nuclear reactor. What they all have in common is their intimacy; they describe deeply private moments that their protagonists may never be able to explain to themselves, let alone share.
Many stories combine both sex and death, none perhaps more starkly than MacLeod's chilling story of a married couple who have sex for the first time in a long while in a hotel room, not knowing next door is a murderer.
Sometimes the sex is off-stage, and the death is metaphorical, as in Lynn Coady's Fin, about the death of a relationship. Coady's wry yet devastated narrator notes how magazines advise women on the importance of self-care at such times: "It mostly has to do with yoghurt and various creams. Nobody ever talks to men about yoghurt."
The collection opens with Drewe's beautifully laconic Dr Pacific. Eighty-year-old Betty is a widow, but she still goes for her morning lighthouse walks and ocean swims. Then one morning she finds a very particular piece of flotsam on the beach and experiences a frisson that makes her feel "reckless … almost like a teenager".
For Yiyun Li's Mrs Lila Imbody, now in an old people's home, there is only the memory of desire. Once she was the secret lover of a great man, acknowledged only in three cryptic footnotes in his biography; now her triumph is to have outlived everyone.
Sex sometimes opens up a chasm that can't be crossed. Clare Wigfall's story The Fortune Fish is narrated by Ray, who runs into an old girlfriend at a party. At first he struggles to place her but after seeing her again, he is forced to wonder "how much I was to blame and for what".
Hall's protagonist in Evie is both confounded and delighted by his wife's sudden, uncharacteristic interest in adventurous sex, and rather than ask questions about her personality change, obliges her desires. Inevitably, a crisis ensues and "Everything after was the penalty for some unknown crime".
And everything does have consequences: two stories feature the 10-Item Edinburgh Postpartum Depression Scale. Dovey's Selene, who has suffered an acutely painful anal fissure as a result of giving birth, is only half-joking when she says that "I'm not really planning on having sex ever again". (She learns to lie when she takes the depression test).
There are many more gems: Guadalupe Nettel's deathbed sexual predator; Kevin Barry's ageing artistes, who arrive at a down-at-heel Toronto pub "like a squall of hectic weather"; and Warner's model-aircraft enthusiasts, whose obsessive routines are disrupted – possibly fatally – by the arrival of a striking young woman and her perfectly realised 1:24 scale McDonnell Douglass DC-8 Super 61, "the impossible-to-obtain Bohums limited edition".
These original and insightful stories extend far beyond the physical acts of sex and death; moving, witty and confounding, they are deeply revealing of the absurdities, dangers and consequences of desire.
Linda Funnell is co-editor of the free online book review the Newtown Review of Books.