Melissa and Tracy are naughty girls who deserve to be punished. Sorry, published. And published they were — Melissa in Italy, where everyone was horrified at her diary of a teenage nymphomaniac, and Tracy in America, where her uptown romp was hailed as the thinking woman’s Pretty Woman.

But Italy’s outrage and America’s praise have less to do with cultural mores and more to do with the content of these two sexually explicit novels. Melissa P appears naked and sultry, a young- looking 17, on the cover of One Hundred Strokes of the Brush Before Bed (Serpent’s Tail, £10; offer £9) while Quan’s Diary of a Manhattan Call-Girl (HarperPerennial, £6.99; offer £6.64) is all swirly writing and cartoon knickers, and her smiling photo is wholesome as hell.

Erotic books have to advertise their content on the cover, but it would be a shame for squeamishness to lose Melissa P any readers, because hers is in fact a revolutionary account of adolescent sexuality. It charts Melissa’s passage from narcissistic virgin to fully fledged sexual explorer, via a string of often humiliating encounters with older men. But the heroine is not a victim. She is smart enough to know when her boundaries are being stretched beyond safety, and she stops before she is ruined.

Quan’s book is adult with a capital A. Nancy has achieved wealth and independence by maintaining standards of prostitutional excellence that would satisfy the most stringent Oftart inspector. She offers safe clean fun in a nurturing environment and knows exactly where to draw the line (anal? Ew!). But when she becomes engaged to a man from the “straight” world and faces giving up the life she loves, she finds that being kept by a husband scares her more than being owned by her johns. It takes thousands of dollars of therapy and girly lunches to work out what to do.

Both these books are fun to read, and mark the transition of erotica from hide-it-under-the-bed to read-it-on-the-Tube. Quan is of the Candace Bushnell school of chick lit, so her work is heavy on the designer names and Ohmigods and, sadly, also on the cumbersome social conscience: her descriptions of feminist focus groups and political activists are embarrassing and often degrading, whereas her sex scenes are delightful. As for Signorina P — steer clear if you have a teenage daughter.

But if you have a teenage son whom you wish was more into reading . . .

MELISSA KATSOULIS

ONE HUNDRED STROKES OF THE BRUSH BEFORE BED
by Melissa P

DIARY OF A MANHATTAN CALL-GIRL
by Tracy Quan

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