A cornucopia of tales celebrating the storytelling power of the LGBTQIA+ community in all its glory, experimentation, beauty and levity.
The History of My Sexuality, by Tobi Lakmaker, translated by Kristen Gehrman
Please believe us when we say this is one of the best debut novels of last – pulsating with abandon, riddled with one-liners, addictive from all aspects, an endlessly loveable coming-of-age tale with contemporary bite. It’s already been a massive hit on the continent, which is no surprise – it’s so rare to find a book that is genuinely hilarious but still able to spin emotion from unexpected loose threads. As you career with the narrator, Sofie, through the tumult of an exploratory and unconventional young adulthood, it becomes clear that there’s far more going on here than a simple confessional – this is an assured and decadently funny new voice.
The Boyhood of Cain, by Michael Amherst
The distinct and precise quality of Michael Amhert’s authorial voice in his debut novel feels intentionally clinical, so that the emotional life of our young protagonist might shine through with more lucidity against the staid confines of his upbringing. When Daniel’s father loses his job at the well-to-do school his son attends (and keeps the family in plush accommodation), they relocate to a small holding in the countryside, where Daniel’s awareness that he is different begins to crystalise. Caught between resentment of and love for his parents, who are fracturing apart in such a terribly repressed manner that the reader begins to wonder at what point their confused son is going to break, Daniel becomes obsessed with a boy in his class and falls under the strange spell of his art teacher. The emotional subtleties of The Boyhood Of Cain, coupled with its utterly perfect cultural references (Jacques Villeneuve debuting his bleached hair, for example), make it a gorgeously acute and thrillingly painful read for anyone who grew up feeling out of place.
Pleasure Beach, by Helen Palmer
Pleasure Beach follows the love story of Rachel and Olga, and a third interlocutor, Treesa; their interconnecting accounts, minds, and voices create a swirling prose style that incorporates 90s music references, literary allusions, etymological wordplay and a playful wit. Loosely inspired by Joyce’s Ulysses and the Homeric epic The Odyssey, Pleasure Beach is set over 1 day in Blackpool in 1999. Adding to the chorus-like hum of the text, the prose itself is rich with sensory imagery, chip grease, sea air, and a mesmerising musical soundscape. It’s a truly delightful and whirlwind read that entwines the magical and mundane – the plights of teen love with the delights of a 99 flake.
Iron Lung, by Kirstine Reffstrup
translated by Hunter Simpson
Iron Lung is a novel in two distinct parts. Yet these are presented more or less side-by-side in the narrative, twisted together into one single peice. One follows a teenage girl coming-of-age inside an iron lung in 1950s Copenhagen, trapped within a machine that might be keeping her alive, but might also be merely slowing down the inevitable as Denmark buckles under a burgeoning Polio outbreak. Her mother and older sister are only able to visit occasionally, and her only regular human interactions are with nurses on the polio ward.
Fifty years earlier in a boy’s orphanage in Budapest, a character known only as ‘Boy’ is kept apart from the others for being different, someone who doesn’t fit into society’s understanding of boyhood: groomed by the mistress of the house and ‘studied’ by a city doctor — but filled to the brim with an Edenic curiosity about their own and others’ bodies.
While these narratives are distinct, they overlap with each other as though happening, somehow, simultaneously. Perhaps they are two characters sharing one soul, or one is the reincarnation of the other, or something even stranger.
Iron Lung is an utterly compelling, poetic, and often unsettling novel about non-conforming bodies, queerness, and 20th century history — like the love-child of Ali Smith’s How to Be Both and Olga Tokarczuk’s The Empusium.
Small Rain, by Garth Greenwell
A novel about illness, set almost entirely in a hospital should be a stupendously hard thing to pull off, but in Garth Greenwell’s hands this potentially un-enticing prospect becomes a truly artful and beautiful thing. The narrator of Small Rain is a poet and academic who is admitted into hospital after the onset of a terrible and inexplicable pain. His condition is quickly understood to be both very serious and very rare, and he is led through the sterile hospital system in a seemingly endless trial of procedures, and it’s in this confusing yet mannered and orderly series of visits, tests and explorations that the narrator discovers a new-found consideration of his own existence.
Garth Greenwell is a big deal across the pond, and although he’s far from unknown over here, he remains something of an unjustly overlooked quantity. Small Rain is one of his more urgent books, the prose suffused with artful musicality and devastating detail. It inevitably makes the reader ruminate on the meaning of care itself, what our bodies and minds do in crisis, the immediacy of difficult moments, the precariousness of our happiness. No matter your current relationship with human frailty, you’re likely to emerge from this book with a renewed sense of just how painfully human we all are.
Biography of X, by Catherine Lacey
Any attempt to sum up Biography Of X in a pithy manner will only get us into trouble, but let’s give it a go? A fictional biography of a fictional artist, written by the fictional artist’s actual partner, all presented as a hermetically self-contained non-fiction document, but one that takes place in an alternative-history version of the United States and weaves in and out of history as WE understand it by employing a revolving cast of pop culture figures who ghost in and out of the story (including: David Bowie! Brian Eno! Connie Converse!). It’s also possibly the most beautifully written, ambitiously staged and emotionally gutting book of the year, which is all the more ridiculous considering the gargantuan scope of the novel. This is as much a chronicle of a world that almost existed as much as it is a prodding of the entire genre of biography, its ethical and moral ickiness (and at its titular character X, who would definitely end up in an episode of Bad Gays if she really existed). An absolutely monolithic expression of a singular vision which we cannot recommend highly enough.
Boulder, by Eva Balthasar translated by Julia Sanches
This slim novella dexterously examines the lines between family commitment and personal freedom, speaking to those who resist the bonds of partnership and parenthood. Exploring motherhood from the outside, this book investigates the possible alienation of parenting, considering those who identify neither with the noun ‘mother’, or the act of ‘mothering’ itself.
The Love of Singular Men, by Victor Heringertranslated by James Young
This is such a beautiful, powerful novel about the burning joys of first love, and the overwhelming grief that lasts a lifetime. Camilo, embittered by age and frustrated by his limited freedom, is reflecting on his childhood in 1970s Rio de Janeiro, an intense and passionate time in which he both discovered and tragically lost his first love. During the languid days of a hot summer in the suburbs of Rio, Camilo’s father brings a boy to live with them. In the midst of the family’s dysfunction and the threats on the streets beyond the garden wall, Camilo and Cosme build a pure and passionate bond, but it is soon brought to a cruel and brutal end. The novel thrums with the heat and the vibrancy and violence of 1970s Rio, and the possibility of revenge hovers hauntingly over the narrative.
Heringer’s voice is assertive and delightfully unique, he switches form and style playfully, and I love his wry humour. The social observations are particularly entertaining, as are his rich depictions of his school class-mate character types which ‘serve as a mould for every human being on the planet.’ It’s a novel rich in the joy and pain of first experiences, and the message that love is fleeting becomes doubly poignant in the knowledge that Heringer passed away just before his 30th birthday.
Didn’t Nobody Give A Shit What Happened to Carlotta, by James Hannaham
A literary firework display of a novel, perhaps the most dazzling and impressive reading experience of last year! The titular Carlotta is a trans woman fresh out of prison and back in her Brooklyn stomping ground. We join her as she struggles to reclaim any semblance of her former life, reconnecting with the family who knew her as Dustin, navigating the labyrinthine job market, desperately trying to appease her assigned parole officer, pining for the love she left behind bars. What truly separates this novel though is the writing on a sentence-by-sentence basis – Carlotta repeatedly and constantly interrupts the prosaic narration, spewing ornate invective and commentary in flurries of irresistible vernacular. It’s a truly thrilling reading experience, and one that (like Carlotta herself) goes to extraordinary lengths to hide its emotional heart underneath a coarsely hilarious exterior.
Winter Love, by Han Suyin
Recently republished by Fox, Finch & Tepper, Winter Love explores the passions and frustrations of same-sex desire in the early 20th century through the romance of Red and Mara, two students who begin an illicit affair in wartime Britain. The quietness of Suyin’s prose contrasts brilliantly with the fierce emotions felt by the two women as they attempt to find happiness within the confines of a repressive society. Despite having been written over sixty years ago, Winter Love feels modern in its exploration of toxic relationships and casual sex – and if nothing else, its period setting will have you calling your friends ‘chums’ and wearing pillbox hats for the rest of the year.
The Late Americans, by Brandon Taylor
Anyone who read Brandon Taylor’s Booker Prize-nominated debut novel Real Life will be only too familiar with the inimitable sense of wrenching ennui he can conjure just by relaying simple details in beautiful prose. His second novel, eagerly anticipated and much
lauded by basically everyone, is similarly wrought in the most appealing way. The Late Americans elegantly chronicles the loosely interlocking lives of a group of university students in Iowa, with each character deftly detailed and thrust into the melodrama.
Taylor is already a big deal in America (he’s the recipient of a steadily growing number of awards and fellowships), and on the strength of this stunning novel it’s easy to see why.
A Natural History of Transition, by Calum Angus
In his debut collection, Callum Angus presents a series of short stories united by the theme of transition, which challenge the notion that trans people can have only one transition. His stories are suffused with magic, beauty, occasional horror and a palpable reverence for the natural world. Somehow, even the stories that are unsettling, remain beautiful and tender. These could be read as a kind of guide book toward accepting change, in all its respects – in its horror and goodness. Evidently, this is a very special book indeed.
Nevada, by Imogen Binnie
This is something of a Great American Novel. Originally published in the US in 2013 and only just published in the UK a few years back, Nevada is a mid-life coming-of-age story following a trans woman called Maria: a bad-ass punk bookseller who through a series of mishaps in her personal-life ends up stealing her ex-girlfriend’s car and embarking on an open-ended roadtrip in search of… well what does anyone drive across America in search of…? Deliverance? Self-actualisation? Whatever it is, Nevada feels like a literary and cultural touchstone and a novel of tremendous importance. But also, just extremely enjoyable.
Chase of the Wild Goose, by Mary Gordon
We love this rediscovered gem from new Bristol based publishers Lurid Editions, and are so excited that it is finally out in the world. Originally published in the 1930s by Hogarth Press, Chase of the Wild Goose is based on the true story of the “friendship” between two Irish women from noble families, who leave Ireland and settle in North Wales-gaining here, fame and adoration. It’s a wonderful queer artefact- a literary gift.
After Sappho, by Selby Wynn Schwartz
In our humble opinion, this exquisite novel should have won or at least been shortlisted (it was longlisted) for the Booker Prize. It’s a quietly beautiful text, which consists of small semi-fictionalised biographical fragments of the lives of queer modernist women (Woolf, Natalie Barney, Romaine Brooks, Gertrude Stein, Syliva Beach, and so on) broken up by a kind of Greek chorus comprised of all of the characters. It’s formally inventive, utterly exquisite and rigorously researched. A brilliant kind of collective biography, that is reminiscent of Annie Ernaux’s The Years, and Diane Souhami’s No Modernism Without Lesbians.
Since I Laid My Burden Down, by Brontez Purnell
It’s hard to recommend this strongly enough, but it’s basically everything I want from a novel. Punk, queer, devastatingly sad, shocking, smutty and genuinely hilarious, all in roughly equal measure. If you’ve read Brontez Purnell’s other work you’ll have an idea of the vibe, but this still blew me away with how pitch-perfect the writing is and how well-formed it is; how tragic, sympathetic and problematic DeShawn is as a character; how knotty and raw his memories are; the incredible one-liners followed by absolute sucker punch after sucker punch. Purnell just makes it seem totally effortless.
Notes of a Crocodile, by Qui Miaojin translated by Bonnie Huie
First published in Taiwan in 1994, this fast became a cult novel in both Taiwan and China, and the narrator’s nickname ‘Lazi’ to this day, is still used as slang for Lesbian. Which is to say, this was a very impactful novel-then, and indeed, now. Set in post-martial law Taiwan, it follows the coming of age of a bunch of queer misfits studying at Taiwan’s most prestigious university. It’s a decidedly avant-garde, often hard to follow novel but it is also a deeply moving account of queer friendship, first queer romance, obsession, shame and desire. The blurb labels it a ‘poignant masterpiece’ – a fairly accurate description, I reckon.
Corey Fah Does Social Mobility, by Isabel Waidner
If you’ve read any of Isabel Waidner’s award-winning backlist then you will have some degree of preparation for the riches and delights in their fourth novel, but if this is your first [spiritual guide voice] ‘experience’ of their work you will encounter some of the following in Corey Fah:
- a level of sentence construction that simultaneously breaks, fixes and improves many conventional notions of syntax
insect proboscis Bambi - apocalyptic reality tv broadcast from a dilapidated footie stadium
- hearty critique of awards culture and the personal endeavour we associate with creativity
- a narrative that champions fellowship and companionship and gently dismantles capitalist ideas of culture and commercialism in favour of hope and fraternity
It is a reading experience like nothing else, surprisingly plotty, rendered all the more incredible because it came out via a big multinational conventional publisher (albeit one of the weirder divisions) – Waidner’s journey from cottage-industry publishing houses to the gleaming-office big leagues is one of the most heartening developments in literature this year. The fact that they’ve now featured twice on our BOTY lists in as many years also means they are unfortunately tied to us forever by virtue of their brilliance, we don’t make the rules.
Love in the Big City, by Sang Young Park
A portrait of contemporary Korean queer culture that is both celebratory and mournful, ironic and melancholy in equal measure, rendered in a narrative style that brims with personality. Our narrator ricochets between friends, conquests and boyfriends over many years. But Love in the Big City celebrates this multitude of love: platonic, romantic, sexual; idyllic and devastating. Surely destined to become a queer cult classic.
Tomb of Sand, by Geetanjali Shree
This literal tome might look daunting but it is more than worth a read. Over the course of 700 pages, this deft novel looks a wide variety of themes including old age, depression, the Partition, borders, queerness, mother-daughter relationships and colonialism, with intelligence, humour and great tenderness.
The Opposite of a Person, by Lieke Marsman
A Dutch climatologist leaves her girlfriend behind in Amsterdam while she embarks on an internship in the Italian Alps- where she muses on climate change, homosexuality and coming out, love, loneliness, language, and how to live well and be a good person. It’s a beautiful existential and philosophical novel which will likely make you think about the world in radically different ways – at least it did for us!
City of Night, by John Rechy
A relatively overlooked mid-century American classic: imagine On the Road by Jack Kerouac, if it were much, much queerer and actually really very good (sorry, Kerouac enthusiasts, but that’s just how it is.) Through a beguiling stream-of-consciousness style, Rechy follows one “youngman” hustling aimlessly across the US, jumping between different scores, scenes and slums on an erotic and spiritual odyssey. Utterly unique.
Milk Fed, by Melissa Broder
Hilarious, melancholy and bizarre in equal measures, this is a great summer read. You’ll likely literally gobble it up. 24 year old Rachel is a lapsed Jew with a restrictive eating disorder. Her day is structured by food rules and exercise. That is, until she meets Miriam, who works in her local Froyo shop and becomes intent upon feeding her. The two strike up an unlikely friendship, which slowly grows more intimate marked by hunger, appetites, desire and shame.
Ruth & Pen, by Emilie Pine
In some ways, Ruth & Pen feels like a contemporary (and more accessible) rendition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Taking place in a single day in Dublin, the novel follows the two titular women, unknown to each other but plagued by similar concerns, on the verge of falling in and out of love. Ruth is contemplating her marriage to Aiden, and whether the wounds that they have inflicted on each other can be repaired. Pen is preparing to speak her truth, and tell her best friend Alice exactly what she means to her. It’s a tender consideration of love, miscommunication, friendship, neurodivergence, fertility, the climate crisis, therapy and grief. It broke and simultaneously warmed our hearts and we hope you enjoy your ‘trip’ to Dublin as much as we did.
The Great Mistake, by Jonathan Lee
An achingly well-written historical piece that details the life of Andrew Haswell Green, the real-life ‘Father of Greater New York’ and pivotal figure in the construction of Central Park. Gently fictionalising and extrapolating the details of his repressed inner life and the circumstances of his tragic death (possibly the great mistake of the title), it is a jewel of restraint.
Woman on the Edge of Time, by Marge Piercy
Simply put, Woman on the Edge of Time is a masterwork of feminist science-fiction. While unfairly institutionalised, Connie flits in and out of the present: from the dystopic but not-so-unfamiliar world of 1970s New York, to the possible society of “Mattapoisett”–a decentralised, classless, and gender non-conforming vision of the future.
Our Wives Under the Sea, by Julia Armfield
When marine biologist Leah returns to her wife Miri after an extended deep sea voyage, it’s clear that she has come back altered. She is distant and strange, changed beyond recognition by the experience, and the foundations of their strong and loving relationship have started to crumble. Miri is left questioning who her wife has become, what is left of their marriage, and what happened in the depths of the ocean? This is a deeply atmospheric, haunting and romantic novel with an eeriness that stayed with us long after finishing the book.
Paul Takes The Form Of A Mortal Girl, by Andrea Lawlor
Absolutely rampant and vicious with its description of a life lived at a frenetic social and sexual pace, the adventures of Paul Polydoris are simultaneously life-affirming and alarming. With a soundtrack perfectly pitched at the inception of the transgressive grunge scene, this is a richly told and indefatigable hymn to excess, and one that doesn’t shy away from the varying emotional fallout.
The Fat Lady Sings, by Jacqueline Roy
The term “rediscovered classic” gets bandied around a lot, but in this case it’s apt. Rediscovered and republished by Bernadine Evaristo as part of Penguin’s “Black Britain: Writing Back” series, it absolutely deserves to remain shelved alongside the other greats of modern British writing. The Fat Lady Sings follows two Black women from very different worlds who have fallen through the social cracks, stuck going round in circles inside a health system which is only interested in silencing and sedating them. This might sound pretty heavy, but The Fat Lady Sings is a radically hopeful and enjoyable novel about Black British identity, queer joy and found family.
Giovanni’s Room, by James Baldwin
You’re in a very safe pair of hands with James Baldwin. His considered style of prose is almost relaxing in its pace and weight, even when you can feel the heat coming off the page. Giovanni’s Room is a great place to start with Baldwin’s work, and has very much earned its place as a queer classic. But, no reason to stop there – his oeuvre is varied and phenomenal.
Detransition, Baby, by Torrey Peters
Destransition Baby has become that book everyone’s talking about – and deservedly so. A funny, warm and compulsively readable depiction of motherhood in all its forms, built with compassion and detail into that rarest of novels: one that lives up to its excellent title.
The Adventures of China Iron, by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
This is a book that will transport you to the dusty plains of the Pampas in 1872, evoking the excitement of wind-in-your-hair journeys, the joy of discovery and the freedom of travel. It’s a journey of unlikely friendships, rich cultural discovery, sexual awakening and British customs in the wild and endless Pampas (Liz seems to be able to produce un-ending tea, whisky, umbrellas and other luxury items from the depths of the wagon). You’ll be swept up by the sense of freedom and you will punch the air in celebration of China Iron’s joyful and liberating journey.