FORGET being swept away with romantic locations, sensitive, handsome lovers and Mills and Boon-style love-making, the latest trend in erotic fiction is graphic confessionals that will shock, entertain and amuse. Whether they titillate depends on if you are in the mood for suffocation fetishes; sex with strangers, swingers, plastic toys or old friends; rape scenes in back alleys; or blow by blow accounts of how pornographic movies are made.

 Confess-all, diary-styled sex memoirs aren't a new phenomenon - think Marquis de Sade or Anais Nin -- but what is interesting is the way writers including Rosa Mundi, Abby Lee and Melissa P. are pushing boundaries and challenging concepts of female sexuality.

Each of these authors indulges in a heady escapism in which female protagonists have sex however, and with whoever, they desire, without any real fear of being abused, unsatisfied or judged.

The press release accompanying Rosa Mundi's Vocational Girl ends with a teasing note that Rosa Mundi is a pseudonym concealing the identity of a well-known female British author. UK newspapers reported the real writer as British author Fay Weldon. Despite assuming that the pseudonym is a publicity stunt, one still wonders if Weldon employed the pen name in a bid to give her the confidence to step into the French knickers and super-tight corset of her alter ego.

Vocational Girl is the tale of Vanessa's journey out of her comfort zone as a receptionist-prostitute at a swanky London hotel into a world where sex is served every way but straight up. Their penchant for threesomes and imaginative sex ultimately has Vanessa working at a sex club where suffocation fetishists nearly drown her in a bathtub and sadistic punters restrain her with sex toys named after medieval torture devices.

Depictions of X-rated sex are interesting, if abruptly and coldly written, but more intriguing is the strange love between Alden and Vanessa as she happily plays a submissive sex slave to his dominating master.

The structure works well. Diary entries are grouped in chapters, in between are women's magazine-style guides to one night stands, how to behave in a sex shop and the pros and cons of penis size. Every thing a single girl (or guy) needs to know.

As a 16-year-old Sicilian schoolgirl, Melissa Panarello shocked Europe with an autobiographical account of her initial extensive forays into sex, which involved teachers and married men. She was only 19 when she wrote this story and it has all the angst and self-obsession typical of a teenager, but its candid vulnerability redeems it.