Sex, lies and Laura Bush

All you never really wanted to know about the sex lives of President Dubya Bush and his famously frosty First Lady Laura is at the core of a novel due to be published to Republican blushes as the flag goes down on the election season this autumn.

It is called American Wife and comes from Curtis Sittenfeld, a woman of 33 whose first novel Prep was the sleeper bestseller of 2003 and a contender for the Orange Prize. It was about sex, romance and upper-crust social hypocrisy as a naive country girl goes to an East Coast 'prep' school.

Random House promises to publish American Wife with very similar themes in time for the Republican nominating convention. No delegate will be looking at the outgoing First Lady in quite the same way.

"His butt was small in the way

that I always forgot a lot of men's were. How could he possibly be an unscrupulous politician with such a cute little butt?"... Or "This is the moment I knew I could love him, when I saw his penis. With the men in my past the penis had seemed an odd creature, both comic and forlorn. But I felt a great devotion to Charlie when I first got a look at his, the ruddy-hued, upward-pointing shaft, its swollen veins and cap-like tip."

Charlie Blackwell is the scion of a blue-blood Yankee family who becomes President, and Alice, the central character, is the quiet librarian who marries him. Charlie also gets rave reviews for cunnilingus with his "bobbing head, and his earnest assiduous lapping".

Sittenfeld makes sure we all know who she is writing about by using known facts before delving into the cauldrons of desire lying just