Put These Popular LGBTQ+ Books on Your Reading List

Goodreads Description: “It’s the fall of 2024, and 24-year-old Cat isn’t asking for too much: All she wants is three boyfriends, to write her little novels, and to survive another chaotic presidential election. She’s in an open relationship with her college sweetheart Jay, but nonmonogamy isn’t just a hot trend she’s trying. It’s her sliver of freedom in a world eager to wrestle it from her for being a Black woman going after what she wants with reckless abandon.

While political tensions roil the campus where Cat is slowly earning her creative writing degree, she finds herself drawn to Jay’s best friend, Tristan, who’s smart, super hot, and… in a monogamous relationship. And then she meets Tristan’s girlfriend, Nia, a captivating art student with her own gravitational pull.

Friends and family urge her to just be happy with Jay, but Cat is determined to have it all—or blow up her life trying. As she falls for all the wrong people, racking up lies, betrayals, and terrible drafts of her novel, she tries to write her way to a happy ending. But in art, politics, and love, true liberation may take more than rewriting the old scripts. It may mean inventing something entirely new.”

Goodreads Description: “Fifteen-year-old Mina’s whole world is her two best friends, but after an unexpected kiss, the established dynamics of their trio quickly unravel. Everything that was once shared openly, from clothes to secrets, now feels impossibly fragile. Loyalties shift and tensions simmer across the long days of this pivotal summer, where the girls have nowhere new to go and everything new to feel.

Looking back, an adult Mina traces the undercurrents of longing that shaped her first experience of desire. The rituals of girlhood—gossip, selfies, sleepovers, and videogames—become threads in a delicate, volatile web of intimacy, in which everything feels achingly fleeting and permanently etched. Loving one person, Mina learns, can change the way we love everyone else—including ourselves. 

Bold, vulnerable, and sharply observant, Girl’s Girl is a sundrenched and dewy snapshot of modern girl culture set in the blaze of one suburban Midwest summer.”

Goodreads Description: “It is 1968 Oakland, and Natalia Fuentes has been hearing rumors about the beautiful Violeta Miramontes. The young heiress to Spanish colonial wealth has been left paralyzed by a mysterious illness. But Nati knows a thing or two about witchcraft, and she is certain that this is the work of dark magic.

Armed with a plan to break the spell and earn a handsome reward, Nati works her way into the house as Violeta’s caretaker, and immediately discovers her suspicions are true. But who cursed Violeta? And why?

As feelings between the two women bloom into romance, Nati grows more and more reckless, and is forced to face her own ghosts—ones she hoped would stay gone forever.

Riveting and richly layered, Muñeca explores how far one will go to save the person they love—even if that means damning themselves. Cynthia Gómez fills her debut novel with moments that chill your bones and warm your heart, a razor-sharp examination of deep-rooted issues that will haunt readers long after the last page is turned.”

Goodreads Description: “Erica and Laure meet on the steps of the Sacré-Coeur in Paris, 1978. Erica is a student, relishing her first summer abroad before beginning university at home in England. Laure is studying for her PhD at the Sorbonne, drinking and smoking far too much, and sleeping with a married woman. The moment the two women meet, the spark is undeniable, but their encounter turns into far more than a summer of love. It is the beginning of a relationship that will define their lives and every decision they have yet to make…

Erica and Laure’s love story spans decades, marriage, children, secret trysts, and the agonizing changes—both personal and political—that might mean they can be together, after all. But when life brings them within touching distance again, will they be brave enough to seize a future together?

Beautifully capturing young love and all its complexities, Almost Life is a story of longing for the paths not taken, and the almost lives we live.”

Goodreads Description: “Vernice and Annie, two motherless daughters raised in Honeysuckle, Louisiana, have been best friends and neighbors since earliest childhood, but are fated to live starkly different lives. Raised by a fierce aunt determined to give her a stable home in the wake of her mother’s death, Vernice leaves Atlanta at eighteen for Spelman College, where she joins a sisterhood of powerfully connected Black women and marries into an affluent family. Annie, abandoned by her dissolute mother as a child, and fixated on the idea of finding her and filling the bottomless hole left by her absence, sets off on a journey that will take her into a world of peril and adversity, as well as love and adventure, and culminate in a battle for her life.

A novel about mothers and daughters, about friendship and sisterhood, and the complexities of being a woman in the American South, Kin is an exuberant, emotionally rich, unforgettable work from one of the brightest and most irresistible voices in contemporary fiction.”

Goodreads Description: “The road stretched out before them. No other cars, just the headlights on the blacktop. Above, the cracked moon in a kaleidoscope sky….

Husbands Don and Rodney have lived a good long life. Together they’ve experienced the highest highs of love and family, and lows so low that they felt like the end of the world.

Now, the world is ending for real. A wandering black hole is coming for Earth and in a month everything and everyone they’ve ever known will be gone.

Suddenly, after 40 years together, Don and Rodney are out of time. They’re in a race against the clock to make it from Maine to Washington State to take care of some unfinished business before it’s all over.

On the road they meet those who refuse to believe death is coming and those who rush to meet it. But there are also people living their final days as best they know how—impromptu weddings, bright burning bonfires, shared meals, and new friends.

And as the black hole draws near, among ball lightning and under a cracked moon in a kaleidoscope sky, Don and Rodney will look back on their lives and ask if their best was good enough.

Is it enough to burn bright if nothing comes from the ashes?”

Goodreads Description: “Yara can’t comprehend why God has chosen them to slay Dominic, the ruthless leader of the army of Bad Guys. Cast out by their family and reeling from a destructive relationship, Yara has never felt weaker—but with nothing left to lose, they strike a deal. Abandoning their solitary days of embroidery and obsessive cleaning, Yara reluctantly embarks on a perilous odyssey designed to prepare them for the daunting mission ahead.

Meanwhile, Adrena, a disillusioned prophet with a terrifying secret power, is determined to become the hero of this story. Desperately seeking the glory of God’s approval and the promise of heaven, where she hopes to reunite with her beloved mother, Adrena must first persuade Harpo, the leader of the Good Guys, that her plan is God’s will.

As their journeys unfold in a series of unforgettable adventures, Yara and Adrena are propelled toward each other and transformative revelations about life, death, and destiny in this intensely captivating, irreverent epic from a singularly brilliant new voice in fiction.

Goodreads Description: “This tender, elegant debut examines the struggle of holding a family together when secrets threaten to unravel it.

Sisters Manda and Siripon have been divided by continents for years, estranged since their parents decided to send just one of their daughters from Phet Buri to America—the foreign land they call “the Outer Country.” As the eldest, Manda assumed she would be the first to go. When their parents chose Siripon, the more obedient second daughter, the decision sparked a lifetime of rivalry.

The birth of Siripon’s son brings the sisters back together. Despite the disorientation of Los Angeles and the difficulty of sharing her sister’s home, Manda becomes a second mother to Ben, a precocious only child who fills her with fierce joy. But as Ben grows increasingly effeminate, her joy transforms to fear. Believing that the spirit of a dead girl has possessed her beloved nephew—and that her sister won’t do anything to fix matters—Manda and Ben’s father, Kamron, secretly arrange a Buddhist exorcism. The ceremony sets off a decade of anxiety-induced illness and bullying, even as the ritual burrows beyond Ben’s memory.

For Ben to grow into his authentic self, he must accept his queerness and confront the scars of his past. He attempts to navigate his family’s tense relationships and live amidst the damage. But how long can they all go on before the truths are uncovered?

From the mangrove forests of Thailand to a modest stucco house in Los Angeles to the sandstone quadrangles of Stanford, The Outer Country is at once epic and intimate in scope, a breathtaking journey across cultures and generations.”

Goodreads Description: “Xavier C. Barlow, one of Hollywood’s young Black stars taking the industry by storm in the late 1950s, is Skyline Studios’s ambitious attempt to rival Sidney Poitier’s burgeoning success. His arrival into the industry is calculated, his charm is magnetic, and his seductive screen presence appeals to both audiences and celebrities across generations.

But years later, after Xavier dies at the height of his fame, Aaron Touissant—Skyline’s designated backlot fixer who helps the studio’s stars stay as deep in the closet as humanly possible—is finally ready to expose the powerful culprits responsible for his untimely death.

Written as part-confessional, part-cris de coeur from Aaron’s panoramic lens, There’s Only One Sin in Hollywood is a searing portrait of the movie industry as a manicured minefield and a compelling journey into the queer history of Los Angeles.”

Goodreads Description: “Jamie is bad at endings, which is why she’s stuck at a dead-end Baltimore newspaper job, continuing to have break-up sex with her first-ever hetero partner, and haunted by the what-ifs of her ex-girlfriend Mari—a charismatic and brilliant musician—and their former band together, the Maidenheads. Since they (and their band) broke up a decade ago, Jamie hasn’t been able to sing.

Then an unexpected opportunity to perform in D.C. with Mari’s successful new band arises, and Jamie jumps at it. What begins as a return to music becomes a reckoning—with the weight of unfinished love, the voice she long buried, and her own complicated past. But as Jamie channels more of her energy into the band, other threads in her life begin to fray, and she must make some urgent choices about her future.

Electric, spine-tingling, and filled to the brim with tenderness and honesty, The Maidenheads is a novel about the tenacity of first love, the life-changing power of music, and the difficult, necessary work of becoming yourself.”

Goodreads Description: “College professor Jesse del Ruth has been abandoned. Thirty years into their relationship, Jesse witnesses his husband Norman get out of bed late one night, walk into their Joshua Tree backyard, step into a strange beam of light and… disappear. How could Norman desert him after a lifetime together? Where did he go? And, most confoundingly… will he ever return? Jesse knew they were longing for something, both feeling stuck. But had Norman been so stuck that his only option was to leave Jesse behind?

As Jesse struggles to understand Norman’s disappearance, he tries to piece together his new reality. Is he expected to wait patiently for a partner who may never come back? Or is this an opportunity for reinvention? He is, after all, alone for the first time in his adult life. Should he return to the classroom? Put in a pool? Get a dog? Call his estranged mother? What does it mean to be alone when you’ve always been one half of a whole?

When Norman’s sister Lally lands on Jesse’s doorstep with an urgent request, Norman’s absence becomes even more profound. Add to Jesse’s grief and confusion a conspiracy-theorist neighbor, a strange man following him, and suspicions that he may have had a hand in Norman’s disappearance, and Jesse starts to crack under the pressure. With his husband missing and the world closing in, all eyes are on Jesse. Before he can understand how Norman could leave it all behind, Jesse must confront what it means to stay.

In Take Me With You, Steven Rowley brings his resonant wit and emotional insight to an epic love story—an exploration of the forces that draw two people into the same orbit and the gravity that threatens to pull them apart.”

Goodreads Description: “Love evens the score between two tennis players in this stunning debut romance.

Recently-turned-pro tennis player Austin Hardy has been out since high school and it’s never been a big deal. That is, until he becomes the first openly gay man to compete in a Grand Slam. Suddenly, being gay is a huge deal, with headlines to prove it.

Unprepared for this new spotlight, Austin’s anxiety disorder hits a breaking point, and he trips and falls at practice. Right next to the very attractive, very talented, and probably straight Diego Cruz, ranked World #2.

The two players start a friendship off the court. But between their flirty banter, mixed signals, and brewing rivalry, Austin is thrown further off his game by Diego.

With the eyes of the world on Austin, the weight of history on his shoulders, and Diego across the net—he must decide if love means nothing or if love means everything as he battles for the trophy during an electric two weeks at the US Open.”

Goodreads Description: “Simon and Charlie, actors on a long-running sci-fi show, can’t stand one another. Charlie is impetuous, outgoing, and basically feral, and Simon thinks he should have stayed in reality television where he belongs. They’ve spent the better part of a decade quarreling over the spotlight and pretty much everything else, and everybody in the industry knows it. Now that Simon’s contract is finally done, he can move to New York, start fresh with work he actually likes, and get away from Charlie.

Simon’s only problem is that people might assume he’s been pushed off the show due to being impossible to work with. And he is kind of difficult to work with. He doesn’t get along with people—unlike Charlie, who somehow tricked everyone on the show into adoring him despite some outrageously bad on-set behavior during the show’s first season. Simon would rather never have to see Charlie again, but reluctantly agrees to stage a very public friendship during the short time before he moves. When Charlie has to leave town to deal with a family emergency, this means Simon comes along. Their road trip brings Simon to places he would never have willingly chosen to visit—and he finds he’s actually not having a terrible time.

The more he gets to know Charlie, the more Simon suspects he’s underestimated his former coworker. Simon also realizes that after seven years, Charlie might know him better than anyone ever has. Even stranger, Charlie seems to be starting to actually like him, despite knowing him so well. Still, Simon is about to move three thousand miles away, so whatever’s starting between him and Charlie can’t really amount to anything… right?”

Goodreads Description: “Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the island of Harris to find that little has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal begrudgingly resumes his old life, stuck between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for several decades. Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As lambing season turns to shearing season, everything seems poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly knotted.

John of John is a singular novel about duty and patience and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that shows Douglas Stuart working at an even higher level of artistic creation.”

Goodreads Description: “Tony Ward has landed back in Lucan with his chest puffed up and a chip on his shoulder. After five years in the UK, staying out of trouble just like he’d been told to do, he’s returned home to his west Dublin estate ready to reinstate himself into the gangland scene.

But things are different now. Tony’s old mentor is dead and his best pal Kenny Boyle has gone on the straight and narrow. That won’t do, so when an opportunity to work directly for Darren ‘Flute’ Walsh, an enforcer of notorious crime boss Aengus Lavelle presents itself, it seems like a no brainer.

Flute Walsh is a far-cry from the meek, quiet boy Tony knew in school. Working as his left-hand man offers a level of security against repercussions for the crimes he’d gone on the run for as well as giving him a way into the life he wants but none of that stops the big-man Lavelle making it clear that any trouble from his past will be Tony’s alone to answer for.

Already burned by the empty promises of one dead mentor, Tony is keen to prove himself as his own man, but there is a pull to Flute Walsh, one he’s felt before. With the fragments of his past life still in the rearview and a whole new gang of headbangers to contend with, it is a pull too hard to resist. As Tony turns his back on the paper-thin structures that support him he looks for stability in his new, brutal surroundings. But where is there room for love in a world like this, where anything that’s buried is always unearthed and retribution is never far away?”