What do you want when no one is watching? Who do you fantasise about when the lights are off?When you think about sex, what do you really want? When we talk about sex, we talk about womanhood and motherhood, infidelity and exploitation, consent and respect, fairness and egalitarianism, love and hate, pleasure and pain. And yet so many of us don’t talk about it at all. In this ground-breaking book, Gillian Anderson collects and introduces the anonymous sexual fantasies of hundreds of women from around the world (along with her own anonymous fantasy).

The fantasies are extraordinary: they are full of desire, fear, intimacy, shame, satisfaction and, ultimately, liberation. From fantasising about someone off-limits to conjuring a scene with multiple partners, from sex that is gentle and tender to passionate and playful, from women who have never had sex to women who have had more sex than they can remember, these letters provide a window into the most secret part of our minds. Want reveals how women feel about sex when they have the freedom to be totally themselves.