Swimming in the Dark

I love this book because you feel like you are a participant, and so you see and feel the effects of the suffocating environment suffocate you, too.

It’s gorgeous in places. Although it is a fiction book, it is genuinely historical and political. It hits all the right notes in all the right ways. 

Oprah Magazine describes the novel as Call Me By Your Name set in Communist Poland and I cannot think of a more fitting description!

The romance between the leads, Ludwik and Janus begins in an idyllic summer in a rural setting. When the novel moves to Warsaw and Janus gets a prestigious, highly-coveted government job, politics enters their lives like an unwelcome but impossible-to-get-rid-of third party and their relationship pays the price. How could it not? It is, after all, the age of the iron curtain in a highly-religious Poland.

To read whether our heroes recover from this blow and… show more.

Another international entry in the tales of angst-ridden gay teen love and longing, this time from Poland, where the stakes are higher—you can actually be arrested for it, maybe even killed. This was a gift from my editor, and I read it in two days while on vacation. It brought back all those feelings of teenage longing mixed with fear from my own experiences.