This Pride month in the US, we’re celebrating with the LGBTQIAP+ community through books.
We believe it’s important for people to be seen through authentic & diverse stories to reflect actual lived experiences. That’s why we focus on books about countries written by people native to those lands. This becomes even more critical in the LGBTQIAP+ community so we’ve gathered together 22 global books written by folks in the LGBTQIAP+ spectrum themselves.
If the LGBTQIAP+ acronym is new to you, as Best Life notes, it stands for:
Lesbian: Female-identified people attracted romantically, erotically, or emotionally to other female-identified people.
Gay: Used to describe a number of things, including the LGBTQIAP+ community as a whole, a single individual who does not identify as straight, & men who are attracted to other men in a romantic, erotic, or emotional sense.
Bisexual: Someone who is attracted to people of their gender & other genders.
Transgender: People whose gender identity and/or gender expression differs from what is typically associated with the sex they were assigned at birth.
Queer or Questioning: Before activists reclaimed this word, “queer” was a slur. As a result, this term shouldn’t be used by someone outside the LGBTQIAP+ spectrum. When it is used, it’s a blanket term to define the sexual preferences, orientations, & habits of the not-exclusively-heterosexual-&-monogamous majority. The “questioning” subset refers to non-heterosexual people who are questioning their place within the community.
Intersex: Different from transgender, it’s used to describe people born with anatomy that doesn't fit the typical male & female definitions including an array of biological characteristics. For example: Someone born with a large clitoris, but without a vaginal opening; or with a divided scrotum that appears more like labia. Intersex people's bodies (and, often, their gender identity) straddle the two sexes.
Asexual spectrum: Asexual (“ace”) - Someone who doesn’t experience sexual attraction. Asexuals can be romantically attracted without being sexually attracted. Graysexual - Someone who experiences limited sexual attraction. Aromantic (“aro”) - A person who experiences little or no romantic attraction.
Pansexual: People who feel a sexual, romantic, or emotional attraction toward a person, regardless of gender identity or orientation. As typical gender binaries don’t matter to them, pansexual people can be attracted to cisgender (i.e., someone whose identity & gender corresponds with their birth sex), transgender, intersex, & androgynous people. They're connected to people for who they are.
+ Meaning “not limited to”
Note: Not all who fit the above descriptions identify as such. It's best to ask a member of the LGBTQIAP+ community how they personally identify before assuming. But don’t be rude & don’t expect someone to educate you on their sexuality, gender, or body.
We hope you find reads that interest you, speak to you, or help you see with new eyes.
From India:
A literary sensation in South Asia, this memorable novel confronts issues of sexuality in India through a love triangle with a brother and sister falling for the same man. Cobalt Blue is a tale of rapturous love and fierce heartbreak told with tenderness and unsparing clarity.
Brother and sister Tanay and Anuja both fall in love with an artist lodging in their family home in Pune, Western India. He seems like the perfect tenant, ready with the rent and happy to listen to their mother’s musings on the imminent collapse of Indian culture. But he’s also a man of mystery. He has no last name. He has no family, no friends, no history, and no plans for the future.
Translated from the Marathi by acclaimed novelist and critic Jerry Pinto, Sachin Kundalkar’s elegantly wrought and exquisitely spare novel explores the disruption of a traditional family by a free-spirited stranger in order to examine a generation in transition. Intimate, moving, sensual, and wry in its portrait of young love, Cobalt Blue is a frank and lyrical exploration of gay life in India that recalls the work of Edmund White and Alan Hollinghurst—of people living in emotional isolation, attempting to find long-term intimacy in relationships that until recently were barely conceivable to them
“A mesmerizing novel of heartbreak, memory, and the ease of falling in love set against the impossibility of fully knowing other people.” —Kamila Shamsie, noted author
“One of the most shocking and brilliantly worded stories of love. . . . The story will stick with you, and long after you read it, the novel will play on your mind, forcing you to revisit it from time to time.” ―Buzzfeed
“Cobalt Blue reads like a love song . . . Kundalkar’s writing is masterful in its play of voice, capturing through his characters the claustrophobia of a small town, their longing to escape a middle class existence, and how love, and being in love, has the ability to transform every small detail from the mundane to the magnificent.”—Scroll.in
From Canada
2021 Edmund White Award Finalist
When the airplane piloted by Elias Santos crashes one week before their wedding day, Coen Caraway loses the man he loves and the illusion of happiness he has worked so hard to create. The only thing Elias leaves behind is a recording of his final words, and even Coen is baffled by the cryptic message.
Numb with grief, he takes refuge on the Mexican island that was meant to host their wedding. But as fragments of the past come to the surface in the aftermath of the tragedy, Coen is forced to question everything he thought he knew about Elias and their life together. Beneath his flawed memory lies the truth about Elias—and himself.
From the damp concrete of Vancouver to the spoiled shores of Mexico, After Elias weaves the past with the present to tell a story of doubt, regret, and the fear of losing everything.
”Arresting... [a] deftly crafted novel.” ―Foreword Reviews
“Tan has written an immersive, unpredictable, engaging novel propelled by mystery, softened by tenderness, and enriched with little wisdoms.” ―Patrick Nathan, noted author
”Tan has crafted a page turner from a set of unlikely ingredients—tragedy, grief, pain and the darker shadows of the human mind. But most of all he has written tenderly, resplendently, about love.” —Christopher J. Yates, noted author
”It's rare to find a book that works well as a deeply emotional exploration of grief and as a suspenseful thriller, but After Elias manages this feat.” —Booklist
From Nigeria
Featured on the cover of Time Magazine as a 2021 next generation leader
In critically acclaimed novels, Akwaeke Emezi has introduced readers to a landscape marked by familial tensions, native belief systems, and a boundless search for what it means to be free. Now, in this extraordinary memoir, the bestselling author of The Death of Vivek Oji (view on Amazon) reveals the harrowing yet resolute truths of their own life. Through candid, intimate correspondence with friends, lovers, and family, Emezi traces the unfolding of a self and the unforgettable journey of a creative spirit stepping into power in the human world. Their story weaves through transformative decisions about their gender and body, their precipitous path to success as a writer, and the turmoil of relationships on an emotional, romantic, and spiritual plane, culminating in a book that is as tender as it is brutal.
Electrifying and inspiring, animated by the same voracious intelligence that distinguishes their fiction, Dear Senthuran is a revelatory account of storytelling, self, and survival.
“A once-in-a-generation voice.” —Vulture
“One of our greatest living writers.” —Shondaland
“A thing of great beauty . . . Dear Senthuran is about powerful excellence, especially the excellence that appears in bodies that aren’t white and aren’t male. Emezi is changing the world and our reaction to this kind of power.” —The Paris Review
“An audacious sojourn through the terror and beauty of refusing to explain yourself.” —New York Times Book Review
“The brilliant Akwaeke Emezi candidly shares their reflections on gender, embodiment, queerness, creativity and relationships with the same fierce dedication and candor that defines their bestselling novels.” —Ms. Magazine
From Australia
Min Lee is a workaholic who can’t say no. She substitutes sleep with Red Bull and, through a combination of repression and bad habits, has managed to score herself a luxury apartment, a fabulous boyfriend and the approval of her billionaire CEO. Things are looking pretty awesome… well, apart from those body image issues that constantly plague her.
But Min thinks she's got everything worked out. She's arranged her comfort zone and has zero desire to look outside of it… or, so she tells herself.
It’s not until a troubled schoolgirl tracks her down from the Internet, stalks her to her home and noses her way into life that Min begins to admit that something is wrong in her perfect world. Something that she's never thought about before, and doesn’t even want to think about. Something that has the power to ruin all her relationships and dismantle everything in her life she’s worked so very hard for.
What if “she” isn’t the right word for Min at all?
“When was the last time a book hooked you so deeply you actually worried about the characters when you weren't reading? I didn’t want this book to end!” —Olin Elliott
From Argentina
Winner of the International Booker Prize 2020
Best books published in Latin America 2017 ―New York Times
Best books dealing with feminism, sisterhood and queerness ―Pagina/12
“I took off my dress and the petticoats and I put on the Englishman’s breeches and shirt. I put on his neckerchief and asked Liz to take the scissors and cut my hair short. My plait fell to the ground and there I was, a young lad. Good boy she said to me, then pulled my face towards her and kissed me on the mouth. It surprised me, I didn’t understand, I didn’t know you could do that and it was revealed to me so naturally: why wouldn’t you be able to do that? Liz’s imperious tongue entered my mouth, her spicy, flowery saliva tasted like curry and tea and lavender water.”
1872. The pampas of Argentina. China is a young woman eking out an existence in a remote gaucho encampment. After her no-good husband is conscripted into the army, China bolts for freedom, setting off on a wagon journey through the pampas in the company of her new-found friend Liz, a settler from Scotland. While Liz provides China with a sentimental education and schools her in the nefarious ways of the British Empire, their eyes are opened to the wonders of Argentina’s richly diverse flora and fauna, cultures and languages, as well as to the ruthless violence involved in nation-building.
This subversive retelling of Argentina’s foundational gaucho epic Martín Fierro is a celebration of the colour and movement of the living world, the open road, love and sex, and the dream of lasting freedom. With humour and sophistication, Cámara has created a joyful, hallucinatory novel that is also an incisive critique of national myths.
From Canada
Arseneault is an asexual & aromantic-spectrum writer who writes sci fi & fantasy led by aromantic & asexual heroes. She also maintains a database of aro & ace characters & books from a large variety of writers. City of Strife includes an asexual aromantic character & a graysexual character.
A hundred and thirty years have passed since Arathiel last set foot in his home city. Isandor hasn’t changed—bickering merchant families still vie for power through eccentric shows of wealth—but he has. His family is long dead, a magical trap has dulled his senses, and he returns seeking a sense of belonging now long lost.
Arathiel hides in the Lower City, piecing together a new life among in a shelter dedicated to the homeless and the poor, befriending an uncommon trio: the Shelter’s rageful owner, Larryn, his dark elven friend Hasryan, and Cal the cheese-loving halfling. When Hasryan is accused of Isandor's most infamous assassination of the last decade, what little peace Arathiel has managed to find for himself is shattered. Hasryan is innocent… he thinks. In order to save him, Arathiel may have to shatter the shreds of home he’d managed to build for himself.
Arathiel could appeal to the Dathirii—a noble elven family who knew him before he disappeared—but he would have to stop hiding, and they have battles of their own to fight. The idealistic Lord Dathirii is waging a battle of honour and justice against the cruel Myrian Empire, objecting to their slavery, their magics, and inhumane treatment of their apprentices. One he could win, if only he could convince Isandor’s rulers to stop courting Myrian’s favours for profit.
In the ripples that follow Diel’s opposition, friendships shatter and alliances crumble. Arathiel, the Dathirii, and everyone in Isandor fights to preserve their homes, even if the struggle changes them irrevocably.
City of Strife is the first installment of the City of Spires trilogy, a multi-layered political fantasy led by an all LGBTQIAP+ cast. Fans of complex storylines crisscrossing one another, elves and magic, and strong friendships and found families will find everything they need within these pages.
From Morocco
Written by an author often cited as the “first openly gay novelist from Morocco,” where same-sex sexual activity has been illegal since 1962. Infidels tells the story of a ten-year-old boy, the son of a prostitute, who grows up to become a young gay Muslim, and then a jihadi.
Set in Salé, Morocco—the hometown Abdellah Taïa fled but to which he returns again and again in his acclaimed fiction and films—Infidels follows the life of Jallal, the son of a prostitute witch doctor—”a woman who knew men, humanity, better than anyone. In sex. Beyond sex.” As a ten-year-old sidekick to his mother, Jallal spits in the face of her enemies both real and imagined.
The cast of characters that rush into their lives are unforgettable for their dreams of love and belonging that unravel in turn. Built as a series of monologues that are emotionally relentless—a mix of confession, heart's murmuring, and shouting match—the book follows Jallal out of boyhood on the path to Jihad. It's a path that surprises even him.
From sri lanka
Lambda Literary Award Winner
An evocative coming-of-age novel about growing up gay in Sri Lanka during the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict—one of the country’s most turbulent and deadly periods.
Arjie is “funny.”
The second son of a privileged family in Sri Lanka, he prefers staging make-believe wedding pageants with his female cousins to battling balls with the other boys. When his parents discover his innocent pastime, Arjie is forced to abandon his idyllic childhood games and adopt the rigid rules of an adult world. Bewildered by his incipient sexual awakening, mortified by the bloody Tamil-Sinhalese conflicts that threaten to tear apart his homeland, Arjie painfully grows toward manhood and an understanding of his own “different” identity.
Set in the mannered, lush world of upper middle class Tamils in Sri Lanka, this deeply moving novel, though not autobiographical, draws on Selvadurai’s experience of being gay in Sri Lanka and growing up during the escalating violence between the Buddhist Sinhala majority and Hindu Tamil minority in the 1970’s and early 1980’s.
Refreshing, raw, and poignant, Funny Boy is an exquisitely written, compassionate tale of a boy’s coming-of-age that quietly confounds expectations of love, family, and country as it delivers the powerful message of staying true to one’s self no matter the obstacles.
“Selvadurai writes as sensitively about the emotional intensity of adolescence as he does about the wonder of childhood.” —New York Times Book Review
from Peru
No other writer in the Spanish-speaking world is as fiercely independent and thoroughly irreverent as Gabriela Wiener. Constantly testing the limits of genre and gender, Wiener’s work … has bravely unveiled truths some may prefer remain concealed about a range of topics, from the daily life of polymorphous desire to the tiring labor of maternity.
In fierce and sumptuous first-person accounts, renowned Peruvian journalist Gabriela Wiener records infiltrating the most dangerous Peruvian prison, participating in sexual exchanges in swingers clubs, traveling the dark paths of the Bois de Boulogne in Paris in the company of transvestites and prostitutes, undergoing a complicated process of egg donation, and participating in a ritual of ayahuasca ingestion in the Amazon jungle—all while taking us on inward journeys that explore immigration, maternity, fear of death, ugliness, and threesomes. Fortunately, our eagle-eyed voyeur emerges from her narrative forays unscathed and ready to take on the kinks, obsessions, and messiness of our lives. Sexographies is an eye-opening, kamikaze journey across the contours of the human body and mind.
“The most striking quality of Sexographies is Gabriela Wiener’s fearlessness―her ability to broach any topic without the slightest flinch, however unfamiliar or achingly personal…. Wiener’s essays do not deal solely in sex, but in the exploration of identity and gender. How are we to make sense of our own bodies and the bodies of others? Why is it that we―with the internet at our fingertips―supposedly know more than ever, yet often experience less and are less open to the experiences of others? Wiener urges us to ask these questions in order to uncover the artificial boundaries that have confined us to our own experiences. Nothing is off limits and she spares her readers no detail of her adventures. The result is Sexographies―an addictive and darkly funny collection that surprises at every turn.” —The Arkansas International
From France
An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy.
“Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again . . . Today I’m really gonna be a tough guy.” Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different—”girlish,” intellectually precocious, and attracted to other men.
Already translated into twenty languages, The End of Eddy captures the violence and desperation of life in a French factory town. It is also a sensitive, universal portrait of boyhood and sexual awakening. Like Karl Ove Knausgaard or Edmund White, Édouard Louis writes from his own undisguised experience, but he writes with an openness and a compassionate intelligence that are all his own. The result—a critical and popular triumph—has made him the most celebrated French writer of his generation.
“Haunting . . . devastating.” —The San Francisco Chronicle
“Èdouard Louis speaks of violence, both social and familiar, with tremendous force and feeling. Revelatory, queerly tough, as intellectual as it is impolite, The End of Eddy is a book to shake you up.” —Justin Torres, noted author
from Equatorial Guinea
Orphaned Okomo lives under the watchful eye of her grandmother and dreams of finding her father. Forbidden from seeking him out, she enlists the help of other village outcasts: her gay uncle, and a gang of “mysterious” girls reveling in their so-called indecency. Drawn into their illicit trysts, Okomo finds herself falling for their leader and rebelling against the rigid norms of Fang culture. (Note: The Fang people also known as Fãn are a Central African ethnic group found in Equatorial Guinea, northern Gabon, & southern Cameroon.)
“A breakthrough novel that tells the world, from an Equatorial Guinean perspective, that there is so much necessary life outside of, beyond, before, and after patriarchy. For those of us who have been told that we do not exist. That we cannot exist. That we should not exist. This groundbreaking story full of love and nurturing is a spell for remembering that we do exist, we have existed, and that we must support each other to exist and thrive as who we are.” —Alexis Pauline Gumbs, noted author
“Though I live a world away from Equatorial Guinea, I saw so much of myself in Okomo: a tomboy itching to be free and to escape society’s rigged game. I cheered her on with every page, and wished—for myself and all girls—for the bravery to create our own world.” —Maggie Thrash, noted author
From China
A revelatory and disturbing portrait of China, this is Anchee Min’s celebrated memoir of growing up in the last years of Mao’s China. As a child, Min was asked to publicly humiliate a teacher; at seventeen, she was sent to work at a labor collective. Forbidden to speak, dress, read, write, or love as she pleased, she found a lifeline in a secret love affair with another woman.
Miraculously selected for the film version of one of Madame Mao’s political operas, Min’s life changed overnight. Then Chairman Mao suddenly died, taking with him an entire world.
This national bestseller and New York Times Notable Book is exceptional for its candor, its poignancy, its courage, and for its prose which Newsweek calls “as delicate and evocative as a traditional Chinese brush painting.”
“The book sings. It is a small masterpiece. . . [No one] has written more honestly and poignantly than Min about the desert of solitude and human alienation at the center of the Chinese Communist revolution.” - Vogue
”Gripping. . . .reads like raw testimony. . .epic drama, and. . .poetic incantation. . . . It was passion and despair that made [Min] fearless; it was fearlessness that made her a writer.” —The NY Times
From india
“Fear. I was scared to walk on the road for fear of people recognizing me. I was afraid the police might arrest me. I avoided taking the bus, not sure whom I could sit next to. I was scared to use the public toilet for fear that people might know my difference. I was scared that rotten tomatoes might hit me in the market. I was scared of falling in love for fear of being hit hard.”
The stories in this landmark volume chronicle, in their own words, the lives of aravanis* with narratives of pain and courage, of despair and triumph.
Aravanis have long been the invisible yet hyper-visible subjects of a societal gaze that reduces them to stereotype. Imagined as often as looked at or talked about, simultaneously revered and cursed, they have, in the process, been refused individual histories, lives and identities, even selves. Yet the community continues to challenge and subvert this view, persistently refusing to allow itself to be shamed or victimized. Some of the greatest recent victories in this ongoing battle for rights have been won in Tamil Nadu (a state in southern India), where the government first began to recognize many of the rights of the hijra community.
These stories are amongst the first accounts of hijra lives to be produced entirely by the members of the community themselves.
*As Identiversity notes, “nonbinary identities may seem like a new phenomenon in Western culture, but that’s not the case in other parts of the world. In India, a third gender identity known as hijra (or aravani in Tamil Nadu) has been intertwined with Indian culture for thousands of years, with hijras holding a prominent place in some of the most significant ancient Hindu texts.
Prior to British rule, hijras enjoyed a degree of acceptance in Indian society, playing a key role in celebrations. However, the colonial era was marked by criminalization and persecution, and today’s hijras—which include people who are intersex, transgender, and eunuchs—continue to occupy an uneasy space in Indian culture. Many are forced to eke out a living through begging or functioning as sex workers.
Efforts to gain legal protections took a significant step forward in 2014, when the Supreme Court of India officially recognized hijras as a third gender.
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From Brazil
Winner of the 2017 Best Translated Book Award & longlisted for the 2017 National Translation Award
Long considered one of the most important works of twentieth-century Brazilian literature, Chronicle of the Murdered House finally became available in English in 2017.
Set in the southeastern state of Minas Gerais, the novel relates the dissolution of a once proud patriarchal family that blames its ruin on the marriage of its youngest son, Valdo, to Nina—a vibrant, unpredictable, and incendiary young woman whose very existence seems to depend on the destruction of the household.
This family's downfall, peppered by stories of decadence, adultery, incest, and madness, is related through a variety of narrative devices, including letters, diaries, memoirs, statements, confessions, and accounts penned by the various characters.
“The novel’s edgy and frank depictions of gender fluidity and sexual orientation begs comparisons to Tennessee Williams’s Suddenly Last Summer while its themes of a great family in decay recalls the best work of Faulkner.” —World Literature Today
From France
One of Flavorwire’s “22 Essential Women Writers to Read in Translation”
Winner of the 2018 Albertine Prize, & finalist for the 2018 Lamba Literary Awards & the 2018 French American Foundation Translation Prize
Not One Day won the Prix Médicis in 2002, recognizing Garréta as an author “whose fame does not yet match their talent.”
Not One Day begins with a maxim: “Not one day without a woman.” What follows is an intimate, erotic, and sometimes bitter recounting of loves and lovers past, breathtakingly written, exploring the interplay between memory, fantasy, and desire.
“For life is too short to submit to reading poorly written books and sleeping with women one does not love.”
“Although the book swerves briefly into the erotic, the majority of the text is a heady meditation. Where we expect to find a confession of the body, we are in fact met with a confession of the mind, as Garréta laments the imposition of hetero normative gender roles upon queer desire. This leaves the reader with another question: how can we invent alternate ways to express desire outside of hetero dichotomy?” —Lambda Literary
From Chile
“As Chile descends into chaos, two disparate souls begin ‘an odd-couple romance, in the tradition of Kiss of the Spider Woman or The Crying Game” (Kirkus Reviews).
It is the spring of 1986, and Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet is losing his grip on power. In one of Santiago’s many poor neighborhoods, a man known as the Queen of the Corner embroiders linens for the wealthy. A hopeless and lonely romantic, he listens to boleros to drown out the gunshots.
Then he meets Carlos, a young, handsome man who befriends the aging man and uses his house to store mysterious boxes and hold clandestine meetings. And as the relationship between these two very different men blossoms, they find themselves caught in a revolution that could doom them both.
By turns funny and profoundly moving, Pedro Lemebel’s lyrical prose offers an intimate window into the mind of Pinochet himself as the world of Carlos and the Queen prepares to collide with the dictator’s own in a wonderful snapshot of this period of Chile’s history . . . A touching tale of love and danger.
From the Netherlands
When his twin brother dies in a car accident, Helmer is obliged to return to the small family farm. He resigns himself to taking over his brother's role and spending the rest of his days “with his head under a cow.”
After his old, worn-out father has been transferred upstairs, Helmer sets about furnishing the rest of the house according to his own minimal preferences. Then Riet appears, the woman once engaged to marry his twin. Could Riet and her son live with him for a while, on the farm?
The Twin is an ode to the platteland, the flat and bleak Dutch countryside with its ditches and its cows and its endless grey skies.
Ostensibly a novel about the countryside as seen through the eyes of a farmer, The Twin is, in the end, about the possibility or impossibility of taking life into one's own hands. It chronicles a way of life which has resisted modernity, is culturally apart, and yet riven with a kind of romantic longing.
“Stealthy, seductive story-telling that draws you into a world of silent rage and quite unexpected relationships. Compelling and convincing from beginning to end.“ —Parks
“Sombre, yet uplifiting…a novel of magnificent artistry that seems like simplicity…a tale of suppressed sexual orientation, but so delicately done.” —Michiel Heyns
From Taiwan
Winner of the Stryk Asian Translation Prize, longlisted for the PEN Translation Prize, & a NY Times Editors' Choice
Set in the post-martial-law era of late-1980s Taipei, Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age story of queer misfits discovering love, friendship, and artistic affinity while hardly studying at Taiwan's most prestigious university. Told through the eyes of an anonymous lesbian narrator nicknamed Lazi, this cult classic is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire by an incisive prose stylist and major countercultural figure.
Afflicted by her fatalistic attraction to Shui Ling, an older woman, Lazi turns for support to a circle of friends that includes a rich kid turned criminal and his troubled, self-destructive gay lover, as well as a bored, mischievous overachiever and her alluring slacker artist girlfriend.
Illustrating a process of liberation from the strictures of gender through radical self-inquiry, Notes of a Crocodile is a poignant masterpiece of social defiance by a singular voice in contemporary Chinese literature.
From BRAZIL
Sweeping nearly every major Brazilian literary prize in 2016—including the Prêmio Jabuti and Prêmio Açorianos de Literatura—Amora has propelled Natália Borges Polesso to the forefront of the international literary world.
From an emerging talent comes an exquisite collection of stories exploring the complexity of love between women.
Amora dares explore the way women love each other—the atrophy and healing of the female spirit in response to sexual desire and identity. These thirty-three short stories and poems, crafted with a deliberate delicacy, each capture the candid, private moments of women in love.
Together, these stories and the women who inhabit them reveal an illuminating portrait of the sacred female romance, with all its nuances, complexities, burdens, and triumphs revealed. These pages are adorned with a mosaic of unforgettable moments, including a lesbian granddaughter discovering unexpected commonalities with her grandmother, a teenager’s tryst with her friend after disenchanting sex with a boy, and an old couple’s dreamy Sunday-morning ritual.
From Jamaica
At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is ruthlessly determined to shield Thandi from the same fate. When plans for a new hotel threaten their village, Margot sees not only an opportunity for her own financial independence but also perhaps a chance to admit a shocking secret: her forbidden love for another woman. As they face the impending destruction of their community, each woman—fighting to balance the burdens she shoulders with the freedom she craves—must confront long-hidden scars.
From a much-heralded new writer, Here Comes the Sun offers a dramatic glimpse into a vibrant, passionate world most outsiders see simply as paradise.
Named one of the best books of the year by the Washington Post & a Lambda Literary Award winner.
For readers of Neil Gaiman, Margaret Atwood, China Miéville, and David Mitchell comes a striking debut novel by a storyteller of keen insight and captivating imagination.
On a cool evening in Kolkata, India, beneath a full moon, as the whirling rhythms of traveling musicians fill the night, college professor Alok encounters a mysterious stranger with a bizarre confession and an extraordinary story. Tantalized by the man’s unfinished tale, Alok will do anything to hear its completion so he agrees to transcribe a collection of battered notebooks, weathered parchments, and once-living skins.
From these documents, spills the chronicle of a race of people more than human, ruled by instincts and desires ages-old. The tale features a rough wanderer in 17th century India who finds himself irrevocably drawn to a defiant woman—and destined to be torn asunder by two clashing worlds. With every chapter of beauty and brutality, Alok’s interest in the stranger grows and evolves into something darker and more urgent.
Shifting dreamlike between present and past with intoxicating language, visceral action, compelling characters, and stark emotion, The Devourers offers a reading experience quite unlike any other novel.
“[An] extraordinary piece of meta-fiction: stories within stories . . . trans-genre, transgender and transgressive . . . Who gets what he or she wants and, above all, who has the moral right to their desires, is the heart of this remarkable, multi-layered novel.” —Maclean’s
From canada
American Library Association Stonewall Book Awards Honor Book & Winner, Publishing Triangle Award for Trans and Gender-Variant Literature
What can we hope for at the end of the world? What can we trust in when community has broken our hearts? What would it mean to pursue justice without violence? How can we love in the absence of faith?
In a heartbreaking yet hopeful collection of personal essays and prose poems, blending the confessional, political, and literary, acclaimed poet and essayist Kai Cheng Thom dives deep into the questions that haunt social movements today. With the author's characteristic eloquence and honesty, I Hope We Choose Love proposes heartfelt solutions on the topics of violence, complicity, family, vengeance, and forgiveness. Taking its cues from contemporary thought leaders in the transformative justice movement such as Adrienne MareeBrown and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, this provocative book is a call for nuance in a time of political polarization, for healing in a time of justice, and for love in an apocalypse.
“In this brave and skillfully written collection of essays, Kai Cheng Thom dares to be really honest—to write truths that go beyond easy orthodoxy to her and our own messy, complex, real stories. As a suicide survivor and someone who does work around suicide in queer and femme communities, I deeply appreciate her clarity about how suicide shows up in queer and trans communities and the ways in which social justice, queer, trans and/or Black and brown communities turn on and hurt each other while trying to keep ourselves safe. This is a brave book, and an essential text for everyone trying like hell to create something that will come after the end of the world. Read it, and prepare to have your mind challenged and opened.” —Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, author of Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice