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Queer book recs
150
items A list of diverse book recommendations by and about queer folks. All proceeds earned via Benable will go to a family in Gaza.
Sections
18
Contemporary (adult)
Contemporary (YA)
Contemporary fantasy
Graphic novels
High fantasy
Historical
Contemporary (adult)
Contemporary adult fiction about characters who are gay, lesbian, trans, and more.
When twenty-five-year-old Kai Larssen agrees to pose as his best friend Mariah's date at a family gathering, he doesn't expect to fall-hard-for her twin brother, Ray. Anxious, magnetic, and achingly off-limits, Ray is everything Kai has ever wanted. ...
We Are Made Of Scars & Starlight by Nicole Zelniker
True biz? The students at the River Valley School for the Deaf just want to hook up, pass their history finals, and have politicians, doctors, and their parents stop telling them what to do with their bodies. This revelatory novel plunges readers int...
True Biz by Sara Nović
It begins as your typical boy meets boy. While out with friends at their local university drag night, Tom buys Ming a drink. Confident and witty, a magnetic young playwright, Ming is the perfect antidote to Tom's awkward energy, and their connection ...
Bellies by Nicola Dinan
Juliet Milagros Palante is a self-proclaimed closeted Puerto Rican baby dyke from the Bronx. Only, she's not so closeted anymore. Not after coming out to her family the night before flying to Portland, Oregon, to intern with her favorite feminist wri...
Juliet Takes a Breath by Gabby Rivera
Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does. Born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, star-crossed, fall in love. They are from dif...
Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, the debut novel from the author of The Emperor of Gladness, is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history tha...
On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Contemporary (YA)
Contemporary young adult fiction about characters who are nonbinary, bisexual, lesbian, and more.
Of course Avery Marsh's parents decide to divorce her senior year of high school, but what's way worse, they're shipping Avery across the country to spend the year with her extremely closeted, absentee half-brother Lucas and his secret boyfriend. And...
All I Know So Far by Nicole Zelniker
Icarus Gallagher is a thief. He steals priceless art and replaces it with his father’s impeccable forgeries. For years, one man—the wealthy Mr. Black—has been their target, revenge for his role in the death of Icarus’s mother. To keep their secret, I...
Icarus by K. Ancrum
Ryann Bird dreams of traveling across the stars. But a career in space isn’t an option for a girl who lives in a trailer park on the “wrong” side of town. So Ryann becomes her circumstances and settles for acting out and skipping school to hang out w...
The Weight of the Stars by K. Ancrum
Sixteen-year-old Yamilet Flores prefers to be known for her killer eyeliner, not for being one of the only Mexican kids at her new, mostly white, very rich Catholic school. But at least here no one knows she’s gay, and Yami intends to keep it that wa...
The Lesbiana's Guide to Catholic School by Sonora Reyes
Ariana Ruiz wants to be noticed. But as an autistic girl who never talks, she goes largely ignored by her peers—despite her bold fashion choices. So when cute, popular Luis starts to pay attention to her, Ari finally feels seen. Luis’s attention soon...
The Luis Ortega Survival Club by Sonora Reyes
Seventeen-year-old Cesar Flores is finally ready to win back his ex-boyfriend. Since breaking up with Jamal in a last-ditch effort to stay in the closet, he’s come out to Mami, his sister, Yami, and their friends, taken his meds faithfully, and gotte...
The Golden Boy's Guide to Bipolar by Sonora Reyes
After one of his songs goes viral, Ollie Cheriet gets the opportunity of a lifetime: a cross-country tour, an album deal, and a chance to help his family with their financial struggles. The only problem? Ollie has major stage fright, a symptom of his...
Under All the Lights by Maya Ameyaw
Simone Garcia-Hampton is starting over at a new school, and this time things will be different. She's making real friends, making a name for herself as student director of Rent, and making a play for Miles, the guy who makes her melt every time he wa...
Full Disclosure by Camryn Garrett
Ever since seventeen-year-old Josie Wright can remember, writing has been her identity, the thing that grounds her when everything else is a garbage fire. So when she wins a contest to write a celebrity profile for Deep Focus magazine, she's equal pa...
Off the Record by Camryn Garrett
Sixteen-year old Niarah Holloway’s only goal in life is to get through it unnoticed. That, and to spend her first summer in LA building a doomsday bunker in her backyard. Because if the past few years have taught Niarah anything, it’s that the ocean ...
Our Shouts Echo by Jade Adia
When eighteen-year-old Briar Vincent's mental health takes a turn for the worst, her parents send her to spend the summer in New York City with her older brother, Beau, also known as the drag queen Bow Regard. Backstage at the gay bar where Beau perf...
Don't Be a Drag by Skye Quinlan
When Ben De Backer comes out to their parents as nonbinary, they're thrown out of their house and forced to move in with their estranged older sister, Hannah, and her husband, Thomas, whom Ben has never even met. Struggling with an anxiety disorder c...
I Wish You All the Best by Mason Deaver
Seventeen-year-old Avery Anderson is convinced her senior year is ruined when she's uprooted from her life in DC and forced into the hostile home of her terminally ill grandmother, Mama Letty. The tension between Avery’s mom and Mama Letty makes for ...
We Deserve Monuments by Jas Hammonds
It’s the summer before college and Blake Brenner and her girlfriend, Ella, have one goal: join the mysterious and exclusive Serena Society. The sorority promises status and lifelong connections to a network of powerful, trailblazing women of color. E...
Thirsty by Jas Hammonds
Casey Kowalski once dreamed of becoming a professional singer. Then the universe threw her a life-altering curveball—sudden, permanent, and profound hearing loss—just before her family’s move from Portland to Miami. Now, she’s learning to navigate th...
The Loudest Silence by Sydney Langford
Lou has enough confusion in front of her this summer. She’ll be working in her family’s ice-cream shack with her newly ex-boyfriend—whose kisses never made her feel desire, only discomfort—and her former best friend, King, who is back in their Canadi...
The Summer of Bitter and Sweet by Jen Ferguson
Before that awful Saturday, Molly used to be inseparable from her brother, Hank, and his best friend, Tray. The indoor climbing accident that left Hank with a traumatic brain injury filled Molly with anger. While she knows the accident wasn’t Tray’s ...
A Constellation of Minor Bears by Jen Ferguson
Contemporary fantasy
Contemporary fantasy – or fantasy that takes place in our world – about characters who are nonbinary, aromantic, bisexual, and more.
Gem Echols is a nonbinary Seminole teen living in the tiny town of Gracie, Georgia. Known for being their peers’ queer awakening, Gem leans hard on charm to disguise the anxious mess they are beneath. The only person privy to their authentic self is ...
Godly Heathens by H. E. Edgmon
When you're a geriatric armed with nothing but gumption and knitting needles, stopping a sorcerer from wiping out an entire dragon-fighting organization is a tall order. No one understands why 83-year-old Edna Fisher is the Chosen One, destined to sa...
The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher by E.M. Anderson
In the first adult novel by the New York Times bestselling author of The Ogress and The Orphans, Alex Green is a young girl in a world much like ours, except for its most seminal event: the Mass Dragoning of 1955, when hundreds of thousands of ordina...
When Women Were Dragons by Kelly Barnhill
Love potions is a dangerous business. Brewing has painful, debilitating side effects, and getting caught means death or a prison sentence. But what Venus is most afraid of is the dark, sentient magic within her. Then an enemy's iron bullet kills her ...
The Poisons We Drink by Bethany Baptiste
Opal is a lot of things—orphan, high school dropout, full-time cynic and part-time cashier—but above all, she's determined to find a better life for her younger brother Jasper. One that gets them out of Eden, Kentucky, a town remarkable for only two ...
Starling House by Alix E. Harrow
Eleanor Zarrin has been estranged from her wild family for years. When she flees boarding school after a horrifying incident, she goes to the only place she thinks is safe: the home she left behind. But when she gets there, she struggles to fit in wi...
What Big Teeth by Rose Szabo
When twenty-three-year-old surly, and slightly tipsy, Frankie finds her hag of a grandmother dead on the sofa, her best friend, playful Ben Bowen, introduces her to the magical underbelly of Aspen Ridge, Utah. Ben is a witch, a seer to be exact, and ...
Peachy by Camri Kohler
When his traditional Latinx family has problems accepting his true gender, Yadriel becomes determined to prove himself a real brujo. With the help of his cousin and best friend Maritza, he performs the ritual himself, and then sets out to find the gh...
Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas
Hollis Brown is stuck. Born to a blue-collar American Dream, Hollis lives in a rotting small town where no one can afford to leave. Hollis's only bright spots are his two best friends, cool girls Annie and Yulia, and the thrill of fighting his classm...
The Corruption of Hollis Brown by K. Ancrum
Graphic novels
Graphic novels about bisexual and gay characters.
When Kumiko’s well-meaning adult daughters place her in an assisted living home, the seventy-six-year-old widow gives it a try, but it’s not where she wants to be. She goes on the lam and finds a cozy bachelor apartment, keeping the location secret e...
Shadow Life by Hiromi Goto and Ann Xu
Shy and softhearted Charlie Spring sits next to rugby player Nick Nelson in class one morning. A warm and intimate friendship follows, and that soon develops into something more for Charlie, who doesn't think he has a chance. But Nick is struggling w...
Heartstopper by Alice Oseman
High fantasy
High fantasy– or fantasy that takes place in a world outside of our own – about characters who are bisexual, asexual, trans, and more.
Once a vicious street rat, Prudence Merriweather has clawed her way to the top of society and now enjoys newfound power as the Duchess of Talonsbury. All she has to do to protect her fragile position is maintain the act of gentility, make her husband...
Song of the Hell Witch by Taylor Hartley
Faron Vincent can channel the power of the gods. Five years ago, she used her divine magic to liberate her island from its enemies, the dragon-riding Langley Empire. But now, at seventeen, Faron is all powered up with no wars to fight. She's a legend...
So Let Them Burn by Kamilah Cole
In the world of Awei, magic is not fully understood. Humans can be born of air, guardians haunt old lands, and spirits make up most of society. Raised by a winged spirit in an enchanted forest, Wander is a stranger to the world. Forced out by a magic...
Wander by Allison Stalberg
This is the way the world ends ... for the last time. It starts with the great red rift across the heart of the world's sole continent, spewing ash that blots out the sun. It starts with death, with a murdered son and a missing daughter. It starts wi...
The Fifth Season by N.K. Jemisin
After a lifetime of bounties and bloodshed, Viv is hanging up her sword for the last time. The battle-weary orc aims to start fresh, opening the first ever coffee shop in the city of Thune. But old and new rivals stand in the way of success — not to ...
Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree
For her entire life, the Name-Bearer's sole purpose has been to receive and deliver the names of the future monarchy from the Flowers of Prophecy. But when the child is finally born and the Name-Bearer is sent to the Flowers, they refuse to name him....
The Name-Bearer by Natalia Hernandez
A young royal from the far north, is sent south for a political marriage in an empire reminiscent of imperial China. Her brothers are dead, her armies and their war mammoths long defeated and caged behind their borders. Alone and sometimes reviled, s...
The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo
The forest eats the girls who wander out after dark. As the healer’s daughter, Malka has seen how the wood’s curse has plagued her village, but the Ozmini Church only comes to collect its tithe, not to protect heretics with false stories of monsters ...
The Maiden and Her Monster by Maddie Martinez
As each new decade begins, the Sun’s power must be replenished so that Sol can keep traveling along the sky and keep the chaotic Obsidian gods at bay. Sol selects ten of the most worthy semidioses to compete in the Sunbearer Trials. The winner carrie...
The Sunbearer Trials by Aiden Thomas
Historical
Historical fiction about characters who are lesbian, bisexual, gay, and more.
Gabi Keefer flees Holocaust-era Germany with nothing but her husband, her nephew, and the clothes on her back, but that isn't the whole story. Over generations, her granddaughter, Lena, struggles with drug addiction and an unplanned pregnancy; her so...
From Where We Are by Nicole Zelniker
Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the feeling took root—that desire to look, to move closer, to touch. Whenever it started growing, it definitely bloomed the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a...
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
Aria Tang West was looking forward to a summer on Martha’s Vineyard with her best friends—one last round of sand and sun before college. But after a graduation party goes wrong, Aria’s parents exile her to California to stay with her grandmother, art...
A Scatter of Light by Malinda Lo
It’s 1989 in New York City, and for three teens, the world is changing. Reza is an Iranian boy who has just moved to the city with his mother to live with his stepfather and stepbrother. He’s terrified that someone will guess the truth he can barely ...
Like a Love Story by Abdi Nazemian
Earl "Trey" Singleton III arrives in New York City with only a few dollars in his pocket. Born into a wealthy Black Indianapolis family, at 17, he is ready to leave his overbearing parents and their expectations behind. In the city, Trey meets up wit...
My Government Means to Kill Me by Rasheed Newson
August is a misfit with a pyro streak and Jack is a golden boy on the varsity rugby team — but their intense friendship goes way back. Jack begins to see increasingly vivid hallucinations that take the form of an elaborate fantasy kingdom creeping in...
The Wicker King by K. Ancrum
Horror (adult)
Adult horror about characters who are queer, trans, and more.
Andrew and Eddie did everything together, best friends bonded more deeply than brothers, until Eddie left Andrew behind to start his graduate program at Vanderbilt. Six months later, only days before Andrew was to join him in Nashville, Eddie dies of...
Summer Sons by Lee Mandelo
"Mom seems off." Her brother's words echo in Sam Montgomery's ear as she turns onto the quiet North Carolina street where their mother lives alone. She brushes the thought away as she climbs the front steps. Sam's excited for this rare extended visit...
A House with Good Bones by T. Kingfisher
Three years ago, Alice spent one night in an abandoned house with her friends, Ila and Hannah. Since then, Alice’s life has spiraled. She lives a haunted existence, selling videos of herself for money, going to parties she hates, drinking herself to ...
Tell Me I'm Worthless by Alison Rumfitt
Leah is changed. A marine biologist, she left for a routine expedition months earlier, only this time her submarine sank to the sea floor. When she finally surfaces and returns home, her wife Miri knows that something is wrong. Barely eating and lost...
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Horror (YA)
Young adult horror about characters who are asexual, nonbinary, trans, and more.
Flora Braddock Paz is not the girl who survives. A colorful creative who spends as much time fearing death as she does trying to hide that fear from her loved ones, she’s always considered herself weak. But half a year into the global outbreak of a r...
If We Survive This by Racquel Marie
When Jade Nguyen arrives in Vietnam for a visit with her estranged father, she has one goal: survive five weeks pretending to be a happy family in the French colonial house Ba is restoring. She's always lied to fit in, so if she's straight enough, Vi...
She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran
Since the hurricane, the town of Mercy, Louisiana has been overtaken by a strange red algae bloom. Noon and her mother have carved out a life in the wreckage, trawling for the mutated wildlife that lurks in the water and trading it to the corrupt har...
They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran
Chuck Warren died tragically at the old abandoned mill, but Paz Espino knows it was no accident — there's a monster under the town, and she's determined to kill it before anyone else gets hurt. She'll need the help of her crew — inseparable friends, ...
Lockjaw by Matteo L. Cerilli
Five years ago, a parasite poisoned the water of Ian’s West Virginia hometown, turning dozens of locals into dark-eyed, oil-dripping shells of their former selves. With chronic migraines and seizures limiting his physical abilities, Ian relies on his...
Take All of Us by Natalie Leif
Mars has always been the lesser twin, the shadow to his sister Caroline's radiance. But when Caroline dies under horrific circumstances, Mars is propelled to learn all he can about his once-inseparable sister who'd grown tragically distant. Mars's ge...
The Honeys by Ryan La Sala
Pristine beaches, lush greenery, and perfect weather, the island of Kisapmata would be the vacation destination...if not for the curse. The Filipino locals speak of it in hushed voices and refuse to step foot on the island. They know the lives it has...
The Sacrifice by Rin Chupeco
Laure Mesny is a perfectionist with an axe to grind. Despite being constantly overlooked in the elite and cutthroat world of the Parisian ballet, she will do anything to prove that a Black girl can take center stage. To level the playing field, Laure...
I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me by Jamison Shea
High school senior Andrew Perrault finds refuge in the twisted fairytales that he writes for the only person who can ground him to reality—Thomas Rye, the boy with perpetually ink-stained hands and hair like autumn leaves. And with his twin sister, D...
Don't Let the Forest In by C.G. Drews
Evander has lived like a ghost in the forgotten corners of the Hazelthorn estate ever since he was taken in by his reclusive billionaire guardian, Byron Lennox-Hall, when he was a child. For his safety, Evander has been given three ironclad rules to ...
Hazelthorn by C.G. Drews
Sixteen-year-old trans boy Benji is on the run from the cult that raised him—the fundamentalist sect that unleashed Armageddon and decimated the world’s population. Desperately, he searches for a place where the cult can’t get their hands on him, or ...
Hell Followed With Us by Andrew Joseph White
London, 1883. The Veil between the living and dead has thinned. Violet-eyed mediums commune with spirits under the watchful eye of the Royal Speaker Society, and sixteen-year-old trans, autistic Silas Bell would rather rip out his violet eyes than be...
The Spirit Bares Its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White
The Soler sisters are infamous in polite society—brazen, rebellious, and raised by their fashionable grandmother who couldn’t care less about which fork goes where. But their grandmother also knows the standards that two Latina young ladies will be h...
Flawless Girls by Anna-Marie McLemore
Devon is always being left behind by her genius twin sister, Drew. At this point, it’s a fact of life. But Devon has one last plan before Drew leaves for college a whole year early—The Best Summer Ever. After committing to the bit a little too much, ...
The Blonde Dies First by Joelle Wellington
Erin and Max are two transgender teens trying to get to California. Max is desperate to finally transition, and Erin is longing to understand why she’s on this trip to begin with. The last she spoke to Max was when he suddenly broke up with her two y...
Old Wounds by Logan-Ashley Kisner
Hunter’s life is at a turning point: After years of fighting his father for it, he’s gotten top surgery. He’s finally starting to feel comfortable in his own skin . . . only to be attacked by a strange creature in his backyard. Luckily, his best frie...
The Transition by Logan-Ashley Kisner
Ruby Chen has always played the part of the dutiful eldest daughter: excelling in school; excelling in piano lessons; excelling at keeping her younger sister, Tina, focused on extracurriculars meant to impress college admissions officers. But when a ...
The Dark Becomes Her by Judy I. Lin
Inspired by the dark labyrinthine narration of Shirley Jackson's Hangsaman, Black Forest is the story of a young gay man's battle with reality as it seemingly dissolves around him, forcing him to fight a series of ever-more frightening supernatural c...
Black Forest by Laramie Dean
Growing up in Slater, Isadora Chang never felt at ease in the repressive small town, even before she realized she was bisexual—but after the deaths of two childhood friends, Slater went from feeling claustrophobic to suffocating. So, Isa took off bef...
The Dark We Know by Wen-yi Lee
After a meltdown in her school cafeteria prompts an unwanted autism diagnosis, Cassie Davis moves back to her hometown in upstate New York, where her mom hopes the familiarity will allow Cassie to feel normal again. Cassie’s never truly felt normal a...
Hollow by Taylor Grothe
Regent Academy has a long and storied history in Winslow, Vermont, as does the forest that surrounds it. The school is known for molding teens into leaders, but its history is far more nefarious. Seventeen-year-old Douglas Jones wants nothing to do w...
The Forest Demands Its Due by Kosoko Jackson
Magical realism
Magical realism about characters who are gay, nonbinary, pansexual, and more.
Though Owen Tanner has never met anyone else who has a chatty bird in their chest, medical forums would call him a Terror. From the moment Gail emerged between Owen’s ribs, his mother knew that she had to hide him away from the world. After a decade ...
The Boy With a Bird in His Chest by Emme Lund
Everyone who lives near the lake knows the stories about the world underneath it, an ethereal landscape rumored to be half-air, half-water. But Bastián Silvano and Lore Garcia are the only ones who’ve been there. Bastián grew up both above the lake a...
Lakelore by Anna-Marie McLemore
Graciela Cristales’ whole world changes after she and a boy she barely knows are assaulted at the same party. She loses her gift for making enchanted pan dulce. Neighborhood trees vanish overnight, while mirrored glass appears, bringing reckless magi...
The Mirror Season by Anna-Marie McLemore
Mystery & thriller
Mysteries and thrillers about characters who are lesbian, pansexual, trans, and more.
It’s kind of hard to graduate high school when you’re the prime suspect in an attempted murder. Seventeen-year-old Eleanora Finkel just wants to finish her senior year and get the hell out of Texas. But when her LGBTQ+ club meeting inconveniently coi...
Pride or Die by CL Montblanc
A year ago, beloved cheerleader Stella Blackthorn vanished without a trace. Devastated, her younger sister, Iris, launched her own investigation, but all she managed to do was scare off the police’s only lead and earn a stern warning: Once she turns ...
How to Find a Missing Girl by Victoria Wlosok
On the night Miles Abernathy—sixteen-year-old socialist and proud West Virginian—comes out as trans to his parents, he sneaks off to a party, carrying evidence that may finally turn the tide of the blood feud plaguing Twist Creek: Photos that prove t...
Compound Fracture by Andrew Joseph White
Sam Sylvester's not overly optimistic about their recent move to the small town of Astoria, Oregon after a traumatic experience in their last home in the rural Midwest. Yet Sam's life seems to be on the upswing after meeting several new friends and a...
The Many Half-Lived Lives of Sam Sylvester by Maya MacGregor
Last summer, Luce, Edie, Jane, and Nan took a boat out for one final swim in the river. It was a perfect summer night. But the only one who returned that night was Nan. Edie, Jane, and Luce disappeared, and Nan’s story has always been the same: She h...
Kill Creatures by Rory Power
When Mikky Graves left his small, stifling hometown of Prophets Lake to live with his estranged mother, he thought nothing could ever make him return for good. Until his sister Kyla’s best friend, Erin, is murdered. Mikky never worried about leaving ...
Girls Who Play Dead by Joelle Wellington
Nonfiction
Nonfiction books by authors who are trans, lesbian, bisexual, and more.
Neema Avashia was born and raised in southern West Virginia to parents who immigrated to the United States. She has been a middle school teacher in the Boston Public Schools since 2003. Her essays have appeared in the Bitter Southerner, Catapult, Ken...
Another Appalachia by Neema Avashia
In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school i...
Crying in H Mart by Michelle Zauner
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relatio...
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
“This is not a book about the politics of immigration. This book––at its core––is not about immigration at all. This book is about homelessness, not in a traditional sense, but in the unsettled, unmoored psychological state that undocumented immigran...
Dear America by Jose Antonio Vargas
Older classics
Older classics about characters who are queer.
Enthralled by his own exquisite portrait, Dorian Gray makes a Faustian bargain to sell his soul in exchange for eternal youth and beauty. Under the influence of Lord Henry Wotton, he is drawn into a corrupt double life, where he is able to indulge hi...
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Poetry & novels-in-verse
Poetry by authors who are nonbinary, bisexual, queer, and more.
"Blood Orange" is a highly emotional, important and timely poetry collection by Mx. Yaffa (They/She), a trans Muslim displaced Indigenous Palestinian. Their writings probe the yearning for home, belonging, mental health, queerness, transness, and oth...
Blood Orange by Yaffa As
From The Yellow House And On is a memoir through poetry. The poems of this collection create a camera-like image of the writer's childhood and adolescence in Ohio.
From the Yellow House and On by Sojourner Davidson
In her debut collection, The Whisper, The Storm and The Light in Between, Clara vulnerably reveals her experience as a racialized being surviving Predominantly White Institutions (PWIs) and colonization. She describes her work as a "poetic memoir of ...
The Whisper, The Storm, and The Light In Between by Clara Olivo
Award-winning poet Danez Smith is a groundbreaking force, celebrated for deft lyrics, urgent subjects, and performative power. Don’t Call Us Dead opens with a heartrending sequence that imagines an afterlife for black men shot by police, a place wher...
Don't Call Us Dead by Danez Smith
From spoken word poet Jasmine Mans comes an unforgettable poetry collection about race, feminism, and queer identity. With echoes of Gwendolyn Brooks and Sonia Sanchez, Mans writes to call herself—and us—home. Each poem explores what it means to be a...
Black Girl, Call Home by Jasmine Mans
I'm safe here. That's how Sadie feels, on a perfect summer day, wrapped in her girlfriend's arms. School is out, and even though she’s been struggling to manage her chronic anxiety, Sadie is hopeful better times are ahead. Or at least, she thought sh...
Forever Is Now by Mariama J. Lockington
Michael is a mixed-race gay teen growing up in London. All his life, he’s navigated what it means to be Greek-Cypriot and Jamaican—but never quite feeling Greek or Black enough. As he gets older, Michael’s coming out is only the start of learning who...
The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta
Camino Rios lives for the summers when her father visits her in the Dominican Republic. But this time, on the day when his plane is supposed to land, Camino arrives at the airport to see crowds of crying people… In New York City, Yahaira Rios is call...
Clap When You Land by Elizabeth Acevedo
A modern love story, told in verse, about two teenaged trans boys who name themselves after two Revolutionary War soldiers. A lyrical, aching young adult romance perfect for fans of The Poet X, Darius the Great is Not Okay, and Aristotle and Dante Di...
A Million Quiet Revolutions by Robin Gow
Bavaria. 1880. Hilde was dreamed into existence by the god Odin and, along with her five sisters, granted cloaks that transform them into swans. Each sister’s cloak is imbued with a unique gift, but Hilde rejects her gift which allows her to lead the...
A Warning About Swans by R.M. Romero
Retellings
Retellings about characters who are bisexual, asexual, aromantic, and more. Stories come from Greek mythology, Arthurian legend, and fairytales, among others.
Briseis has a gift: with a single touch she can grow plants from tiny seeds to rich blooms. When Briseis's aunt dies and wills her a dilapidated estate in rural New York, Bri and her parents hope that surrounded by plants and flowers, she will finall...
This Poison Heart by Kalynn Bayron
Princess Eve was raised with one purpose: to destroy the Knight. Far too many of subjects of Queen's Bridge have been devastated by this evil sorcerer's trickery. Eve's own unique magic--the ability to conjure weapons from nature--makes her a worthy ...
Sleep Like Death by Kalynn Bayron
Meka is used to death. After all, it's the family business. As a newly certified mortician's assistant at her parents' funeral home, her days are not for the faint of heart. Luckily her boyfriend Noah isn't squeamish, and Meka is finally feeling read...
Make Me a Monster by Kalynn Bayron
After her mother dies in an accident, sixteen-year-old Bree Matthews wants nothing to do with her family memories or childhood home. A residential program for bright high schoolers at UNC–Chapel Hill seems like the perfect escape—until Bree witnesses...
Legendborn by Tracy Deonn
The Lost Boys say that Peter Pan went back to England because of Wendy Darling, but Wendy is just an old life he left behind. Neverland is his real home. So when Peter returns to it after ten years in the real world, he's surprised to find a Neverlan...
Peter Darling by Austin Chant
I was born on the full moon under an auspicious constellation, the holiest of positions--much good it did me. So begins Kaikeyi's story. The only daughter of the kingdom of Kekaya, she is raised on legends of the gods: how they churned the vast ocean...
Kaikeyi by Vaishnavi Patel
Princess Aurora has a secret. She thinks she owes everything to her fiancé, because he is kind and is helping save her kingdom from war debts. But, inside her heart, she knows she will never belong to him. Prince Elias has a secret. He loves Aurora w...
Vow of Moonlight by Morgana Stewart
Sixteen-year-old Winnie Bray is a liar. As the resident psychic at an oddities shop, Winnie truly can see the future. But her customers only want reassurance, and Winnie only wants their money. Favorable fortunes are a fast track to funding her way o...
Roar of the Lambs by Jamison Shae
To everyone who knows them, best friends Miel and Sam are as strange as they are inseparable. Roses grow out of Miel’s wrist, and rumors say that she spilled out of a water tower when she was five. Sam is known for the moons he paints and hangs in th...
When the Moon Was Ours by Anna-Marie McLemore
The del Cisne girls have never just been sisters; they're also rivals, Blanca is as obedient and graceful as Roja is vicious and manipulative. They know that, because of a generations-old spell, their family is bound to a bevy of swans deep in the wo...
Blanca & Roja by Anna-Marie McLemore
Unwieldy Creatures, a biracial, queer, nonbinary retelling of Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein, follows the story of three beings who all navigate life from the margins: Plum, a queer biracial Chinese intern at one of the world's top embryol...
Unwieldy Creatures by Addie Brook Tsai
When Alex Easton, a retired soldier, receives word that their childhood friend Madeline Usher is dying, they race to the ancestral home of the Ushers in the remote countryside of Ruritania. What they find there is a nightmare of fungal growths and po...
What Moves the Dead by T. Kingfisher
It's Zinnia Gray's twenty-first birthday, which is extra-special because it's the last birthday she'll ever have. When she was young, an industrial accident left Zinnia with a rare condition. Not much is known about her illness, just that no-one has ...
A Spindle Splintered by Alix E. Harrow
Andres Santos of São Paulo was all swinging fists and firecracker fury, a foot soldier in the war between his parents, until he drowned in the Tietê River… and made a bargain with Death for a new life. A year later, his parents have relocated the fam...
Death's Country by R.M. Romero
Romance (adult)
Romance with characters who are bi, gay, demisexual, and more.
For cynical twenty-three-year-old August, moving to New York City is supposed to prove her right: that things like magic and cinematic love stories don’t exist, and the only smart way to go through life is alone. She can’t imagine how waiting tables ...
One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
In this heartwarming LGBTQIA+ romantic comedy novel, a nostalgic summer, a drive-in theater, and a second chance at love spark an unforgettable coming-of-age romance. Wren Roland has always dreamed of the perfect first kiss--the kind that sweeps you ...
Never Been Kissed by Timothy Janovsky
Gabriel Piña knows who he is: a college goalkeeper, a future Liga MX or MLS star, and definitely straight. He's starting his freshman year with a lot of eyes on him and even more potential, but he's got this. Nothing will have him straying off the pa...
Futbolista by Jonny Garza Villa
Ezra Beaumont never felt like New York was truly his home, which is why he's spent the last seven years studying abroad at university and backpacking across Europe. Some may say he's running from his problems, but he just hates feeling stuck. Then CO...
Queried Sick by Dallas Smith
Congressman Jamie Montgomery knows that re-election will be tough as a young, single man representing a newly redrawn district in North Carolina. And that's without him coming out as bisexual. But when he sees Adrian across a bar, Jamie forgets about...
Bi-Partisan by Dallas Smith
Winning the lottery has ruined Opal Devlin's life. After quitting her dead-end job where she’d earned minimum wage and even less respect, she’s bombarded by people knocking at her door for a handout the second they found out her bank account was over...
Late Bloomer by Mazey Eddings
Romance (YA)
Romance about characters who are lesbian, transgender, demigender, and more.
Valerie Danners is in a cult. She just doesn’t know it yet. But when she stumbles upon a queer romance novel at the library, everything about her life—centered around a fundamentalist Christian homeschooling group —is thrown into question. And to mak...
Gay the Pray Away by Natalie Naudus
Phoebe Mendel's day is never ending--literally. On August 6th, she woke up to find herself stuck in a time loop. And for nearly a month of August 6ths since, Phoebe has relived the same day: pancakes with Mom in the morning, Scrabble with Dad in the ...
Time and Time Again by Chatham Greenfield
Bradley Graeme is pretty much perfect. He’s a star football player, manages his OCD well (enough), and comes out on top in all his classes . . . except the ones he shares with his ex-best friend, Celine. Celine Bangura is conspiracy-theory-obsessed. ...
Highly Suspicious and Unfairly Cute by Talia Hibbert
On September 5, a little after midnight, Death-Cast calls Mateo Torrez and Rufus Emeterio to give them some bad news: They’re going to die today. Mateo and Rufus are total strangers, but, for different reasons, they’re both looking to make a new frie...
They Both Die at the End by Adam Silvera
Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it’s like and why it seems so easy for everyone but him to find someone. What’s worse is that, even though he is proud of his identity, F...
Felix Ever After by Kacen Callender
Enrique “Quique” Luna has one goal this summer—get over his crush on Saleem Kanazi by pursuing his other romantic prospects. Never mind that he’s only out to his best friend, Fabiola. Never mind that he has absolutely zero game. And definitely forget...
This Is Why They Hate Us by Aaron H. Aceves
In a twenty-four-hour span, Rafael Alvarez led North Amistad High School’s Mariachi Alma de la Frontera to their eleventh consecutive first-place win in the Mariachi Extravaganza de Nacional; and met, made out with, and almost hooked up with one of t...
Canto Contigo by Jonny Garza Villa
Julián Luna has a plan for his life: Graduate. Get into UCLA. And have the chance to move away from Corpus Christi, Texas, and the suffocating expectations of others that have forced Jules into an inauthentic life. Then in one reckless moment, with o...
Fifteen Hundred Miles from the Sun by Jonny Garza Villa
The Santos Vista neighborhood of San Antonio, Texas, is all Ander Martínez has ever known. The smell of pan dulce. The mixture of Spanish and English filling the streets. And, especially their job at their family's taquería. It's the place that has i...
Ander & Santi Were Here by Jonny Garza Villa
Imogen Scott may be hopelessly heterosexual, but she’s got the World’s Greatest Ally title locked down. She's never missed a Pride Alliance meeting. She knows more about queer media discourse than her very queer little sister. She even has two queer ...
Imogen, Obviously by Becky Albertalli
Amelia Applebaum isn’t in love with Walter Holland. He just happens to be her favorite moderately famous, chaotically bisexual YouTuber. Who she just happened to invite to prom. (But it’s fine. No, for real. If you delete the post, it didn’t happen.)...
Amelia, If Only by Becky Albertalli
Theo Mori and Gabriel Moreno have always been at odds. Their parents own rival businesses—an Asian American café and a Puerto Rican bakery—and Gabi’s lack of coordination has cost their soccer team too many games to count. Stuck in the closet and sca...
Café Con Lychee by Emery Lee
Hollis Beckwith isn’t trying to get a girl—she’s just trying to get by. For a fat, broke girl with anxiety, the start of senior year brings enough to worry about. And besides, she already has a boyfriend: Chris. Their relationship isn’t particularly ...
The No-Girlfriend Rule by Christen Randall
Mahalia Harris wants. She wants a big Sweet Sixteen like her best friend, Naomi. She wants the super-cute new girl Siobhan to like her back. She wants a break from worrying — about money, snide remarks from white classmates, pitying looks from church...
Friday I'm in Love by Camryn Garrett
Short story & esssay collections
Short story and essay collections about characters who are lesbian, bi, nonbinary, and more. Collections are contemporary, horror, nonfiction, and more.
The twelve central characters of this multi-voiced novel lead vastly different lives: Amma is a newly acclaimed playwright whose work often explores her Black lesbian identity; her old friend Shirley is a teacher, jaded after decades of work in Londo...
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and K...
Her Body and Other Parties by Carmen Maria Machado
In her electrifying debut, Julia Armfield explores women’s experiences in contemporary society, mapped through their bodies. As urban dwellers’ sleeps become disassociated from them, like Peter Pan’s shadow, a city turns insomniac. A teenager enterin...
Salt Slow by Julia Armfield
Outsmarting deadly video games, hunting the predatory monster in the woods, rooting out evil within their community, finding love and revenge with their newly turned vampire friend—this anthology upends expectations of the roles disabled people can p...
These Bodies Ain't Broken, edited by Madeline Dyer
Award-winning novelist Randa Jarrar's new story collection moves seamlessly between realism and fable, history and the present, capturing the lives of Muslim women and men across myriad geographies and circumstances. With acerbic wit, deep tenderness...
Him Me Muhammad Ali by Randa Jarrar
To be trans and disabled means to have experienced harassment, discrimination, loneliness, often poverty, to have struggled with feeling unworthy of love. To be trans and disabled means experiencing ableism within our trans communities and transphobi...
Trans and Disabled, edited by Alex Iantaffi
In Wild Tongues Can’t Be Tamed, bestselling and award-winning authors as well as up-and-coming voices interrogate the different myths and stereotypes about the Latinx diaspora. These fifteen original pieces delve into everything from ghost stories an...
Wild Tongues Can't Be Tamed, edited by Saraciea J. Fennell
Horror movies hold a complicated space in the hearts of the queer community: historically misogynist, and often homo- and transphobic, the genre has also been inadvertently feminist and open to subversive readings. Common tropes--such as the circumsp...
It Came from the Closet, edited by Joe Vallese
Speculative & sci-fi
Speculative and science fiction about characters who are lesbian, bisexual, trans, and more.
Loretta Thurwar and Hamara “Hurricane Staxxx” Stacker are the stars of the Chain-Gang All-Stars, the cornerstone of CAPE, or Criminal Action Penal Entertainment, a highly popular, highly controversial profit-raising program in America’s increasingly ...
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Ren Yu is a swimmer. Her daily life starts and ends with the pool. Her teammates are her only friends. Her coach is her guiding light. If she swims well enough, she will be scouted, get a scholarship, go to a good school. Her parents will love her. H...
Chlorine by Jade Song
The Emperor needs necromancers. The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman. Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead nonsense. Tamsyn Muir’s Gideon the Ninth, first in The Locked Tomb Trilogy, unveils a solar system of swo...
Gideon the Ninth by Tamsyn Muir
From a wheelchair user racing to save her kidnapped girlfriend and a little mermaid who loves her sisters more than suitors, to a slayer whose virgin blood keeps attracting monsters, the stories of this anthology are anything but conventional. Whethe...
Being Ace: An Anthology of Queer, Trans, Femme, and Disabled Stories ...
In an alternate 2020 timeline, Al Gore won the 2000 election and declared a War on Climate Change rather than a War on Terror. For twenty years, Democrats have controlled all three branches of government, enacting carbon-cutting schemes that never ma...
The Free People's Village by Sim Kern
When an unprecedented hurricane devastates the city of Houston, Noah Mishner finds shelter in the Dallas Mavericks' basketball arena. Though he finds community among other queer refugees, Noah fears his trans and Jewish identities put him at risk wit...
Depart, Depart! by Sim Kern
The Carls just appeared. Roaming through New York City at three a.m., twenty-three-year-old April May stumbles across a giant sculpture. Delighted by its appearance and craftsmanship—like a ten-foot-tall Transformer wearing a suit of samurai armor—Ap...
An Absolutely Remarkable Thing by Hank Green
The boys of Huaxia dream of pairing up with girls to pilot Chrysalises, giant transforming robots that can battle the aliens that lurk beyond the Great Wall of China. It doesn't matter that the girls die from the mental strain. When 18-year-old Zetia...
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao
It's been eighteen months since the Raxter School for Girls was put under quarantine. Since the Tox hit and pulled Hetty's life out from under her. It started slow. First the teachers died one by one. Then it began to infect the students, turning the...
Wilder Girls by Rory Power
It's always just been Margot and her mother, struggling to get along. But Margot wants more. She wants family. She wants a past. And she may have just found a clue: an old photograph of her mother's, pointing Margot to a town called Phalene. Yet when...
Burn Our Bodies Down by Rory Power