Here are 100 books that Everyone on the Moon is Essential Personnel fans have personally recommended if you like
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Growing up, I wasn't aware of many books or stories featuring characters outside the gender binary. There was George from The Famous Five (whom I loved), and later, there were the films The Silence of the Lambs and Boys Don’t Cry. Not exactly a heartening picture! Nowadays, there is a library’s worth of literature examining the interplay of gender and identity and featuring trans and non-binary characters. This is a list of five of my absolute favorite books by trans and non-binary writers that explore gender and identity–I hope that they speak to you in the way they did to me.
I have never read anything quite like this book. Rosenberg takes the story of the folk hero Jack Sheppard and re-imagines it as the tale of a trans man who first escapes indenture then becomes a hero to the people after a daring escape from prison. He falls in love with Bess Khan, who has fled tragedy in the fenlands to become a revolutionary in eighteenth-century London.
Rosenberg also ingeniously uses footnotes to create the unforgettable character of Professor Voth, who begins by investigating the rediscovered manuscript of Sheppard’s story and ends up telling his own story as well.
I was blown away by the sheer detail, invention, and joy of this riotous story, which blends adventure, queer love, despair, and hope in equal measure. The range and diversity of the characters are mindblowing–I just can’t recommend it enough!
Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, 2019 Finalist for the Publishing Triangle Award, 2019
A New Yorker Book of the Year, 2018 A Huffington Post Book of the Year, 2018 A Buzzfeed Book of the Year, 2018
'Quite simply extraordinary... Imagine if Maggie Nelson, Daphne du Maurier and Daniel Defoe collaborated.' Sarah Perry, author of The Essex Serpent
Jack Sheppard - a transgender carpenter's apprentice - has fled his master's house to become a notorious prison break artist, and Bess Khan has escaped the draining of the fenlands to become a revolutionary mastermind. Together, they find themselves at the center…
I am a queer transgender woman living in the Appalachian South. When I moved here in 2015 I threw myself into doing community-based LGBTQ history. I co-founded the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, an ongoing queer public history initiative based in Roanoke, Virginia. As a historian and an avid reader, I am fascinated by how queer and trans people think about the past, how we remember and misremember things, and what role historical consciousness plays in informing the present and future.
Queer theory can sometimes be head-scratching, but the first time I readCruising Utopia (on a camping trip in the mountains), I found myself gazing anew at the trees above me and my lover by my side. The late great theorist pushes us to reconsider how queerness is experienced and remembered in quotidian times and spaces. From sharing a bottle of Coke with a lover to memorializing abandoned toilets in the New York City subway, Muñoz revels in the ecstatic potential of “queer utopian memory” and queer world-building. Cruising Utopia is a marriage of critical theory and thoughtful storytelling, giving readers a much-needed injection of hope in these thoroughly anti-queer times.
A 10th anniversary edition of this field defining work-an intellectual inspiration for a generation of LGBTQ scholars
Cruising Utopia arrived in 2009 to insist that queerness must be reimagined as a futurity-bound phenomenon, an insistence on the potentiality of another world that would crack open the pragmatic present. Part manifesto, part love-letter to the past and the future, Jose Esteban Munoz argued that the here and now were not enough and issued an urgent call for the revivification of the queer political imagination.
On the anniversary of its original publication, this edition includes two essays that extend and expand the…
Judith Jones became an important mentor and mother figure to me in my twenties, in the wake of my parents’ deaths. Her personal wisdom and guidance, which I received both in knowing her personally and from the incredible archive she left behind, have been invaluable to me during a particularly tumultuous and transformative decade in my own life. I wrote The Editor as I was coming into my full adulthood, and the books on this list helped shape my thinking along the way at times when I felt stagnant or stuck or needed to rethink both how to write Judith’s life and why her story is so vital to tell.
This book fundamentally reshaped my notion of how biography–especially biographies of women–can be written. Shapland felt intimately connected to McCullers as a person and as a writer and also had an inkling there was more to her personhood than previous biographical treatments suggest.
By inhabiting McCullers’s spaces and putting herself in proximity to the writer’s material past, Shapland demonstrates the ways in which convention has limited both the stories we tell and, thus, the possibilities we can envision for our lives as women.
Winner of the Publishing Triangle Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction, Phi Beta Kappa Christian Gauss Award, and a Lambda Literary Award
Finalist for the National Book Award
Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered—an icon and idol—alongside your own? Jenn Shapland’s celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love.
Shapland is a graduate student when she first uncovers letters written to Carson McCullers by a…
I am a queer transgender woman living in the Appalachian South. When I moved here in 2015 I threw myself into doing community-based LGBTQ history. I co-founded the Southwest Virginia LGBTQ+ History Project, an ongoing queer public history initiative based in Roanoke, Virginia. As a historian and an avid reader, I am fascinated by how queer and trans people think about the past, how we remember and misremember things, and what role historical consciousness plays in informing the present and future.
Somewhere in their fourteen-page digression on the 18th-century non-binary American prophet Universal Publick Friend did I realize—once again—that I was nearly done with T Fleischmann’s enchanting book-length essay on transness, time, and art. I have read it three times! As a trans person, I love this book for its meditations on the transitioning body and its sexy tales of intimate encounters. It also offers a critical engagement with the artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s work, as well as a memoir of discovery that, like Fleischmann themself, bounces from New York City to rural Tennessee and back again, charting a geography of queer friendship and memory.
How do the bodies we inhabit affect our relationship with art? How does art affect our relationship to our bodies? T Fleischmann uses Felix Gonzales-Torres's artworks-piles of candy, stacks of paper, puzzles-as a path through questions of love and loss, violence and rejuvenation, gender and sexuality. From the back porches of Buffalo, to the galleries of New York and L.A., to farmhouses of rural Tennessee, the artworks act as still points, sites for reflection situated in lived experience. Fleischmann combines serious engagement with warmth and clarity of prose, reveling in the experiences and pleasures of art and the body, identity…
Growing up in New Orleans, my love of all things magical is the native fruit of the culturally rich soil I was planted in. Witches both fascinate and scare me a little. Reading and writing fiction helps me process what’s hiding behind those fears. My debut novel, Mind Like a Diamond explores thirteen of the most common fears in the form of a competition-style haunted house. Like many of the books on this list, it might give you nightmares. But sometimes being scared is so wonderfully thrilling, you can’t put the book down. For more book recommendations from me, bookish memes, and writing tips follow me on Instagram.
My favorite thing about The Near Witch is that the protagonist makes terrible choices. I find characters who always do the “right thing” boring, and their growth arcs less satisfying. Be prepared not to understand Lexi at first, but I promise she’s endearing in the end.
I’ve read negative reviews that everything isn’t wrapped up perfectly in The Near Witch, but I enjoyed the story’s sense of realness. My preference is for a captivating story, not always one with every answer. The Near Witch is notably different compared to Schwab’s later works, but as someone with a growth mindset, this only makes me love this book more. If you’re a big fan of her work, go into her debut novel expecting something quieter and I bet you’ll be delighted.
ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY'S BEST YA OF THE DECADE * NEW YORK TIMES bestseller * Brand new edition of Victoria Schwab's long out-of-print, stunning debut
The Near Witch is only an old story told to frighten children.
If the wind calls at night, you must not listen. The wind is lonely, and always looking for company.
There are no strangers in the town of Near.
These are the truths that Lexi has heard all her life. But when an actual stranger, a boy who seems to fade like smoke, appears outside her home on the moor at night, she knows that at…
One of my favorite sections in the library is the collections of folk and fairy tales. Especially the lesser-known tales. My novel, Vasilisa, is inspired by the Russian folktale Vasilisaand Staver, plus my question of “how did Vasilisa get so strong?” I love combining folk tales with extensive research of the culture and history of their settings, as well as delving into characters who have vastly different experiences than mine. And I love reading character and detail-rich novelizations of traditional tales. It was difficult to pick only five novels based on lesser-known fairy tales. Enjoy, then go find some others!
This was one of my first introductions to novel-length fairy tales. Shadow Spinner influenced the first stories I made up as bedtime tales for my little sisters. Like Marjan, I love playing with the many threads of traditional tales, weaving them together with my own threads of imagination. I still have folders with my first attempts at writing the thousand-and-second tale of Arabian Nights.
Every night, Shahrazad begins a story. And every morning, the Sultan lets her live another day -- providing the story is interesting enough to capture his attention. After almost one thousand nights, Shahrazad is running out of tales. And that is how Marjan's story begins.... It falls to Marjan to help Shahrazad find new stories -- ones the Sultan has never heard before. To do that, the girl is forced to undertake a dangerous and forbidden mission: sneak from the harem and travel the city, pulling tales from strangers and bringing them back to Shahrazad. But as she searches the…
My idea of ‘good fiction’ – and what I try to write myself – involves secret agents and skulduggery, crime, and romance. My own life has involved a good deal of travel. I studied Education and Drama, then Literature, History, and Politics at post-graduate level. All of which help with my research and writing. As a British ex-pat, I have lived in the USA and different parts of Europe. Now, we are finally settled near Málaga, Spain. ‘Deep-reading’ fiction set in fascinating places, quality content to indulge in on dark winter nights. I hope you enjoy your time travel as much as I do.
Technically this is not historical fiction, but if you know anything about Venice and Constantinople, you will recognise our world in the past. Guy Gavriel Kay’s magical writing weaves history into fantasy, where incredible occurrences become perfectly credible. This story is about various individuals caught up in a conflict between those who worship the stars and those who pray to the sun. Each character is very real in their flaws and ambitions and desires. Battles are fought across the fantasy Balkan states and the Adriatic Sea, involving Seressa (Venice) and the Asharites (the ‘infidel’). Kay’s books are quite simply splendid; I love the way they take me on exciting journeys with fascinating characters. Un-put-downable.
Guy Gavriel Kay, bestselling author of the groundbreaking novels Under Heaven and River of Stars, once again visits a world that evokes one that existed in our own past, this time the tumultuous period of Renaissance Europe - a world on the verge of war, where ordinary lives play out in the grand scheme of kingdoms colliding.
From the small coastal town of Senjan, notorious for its pirates , a young woman sets out to find vengeance for her lost family. That same spring, from the wealthy city-state of Seressa, famous for its canals and lagoon, come two very different…
Astronomy teaches us that our bodies are quite literally star stuff, chemical elements made inside exploding stars. For much of my life, I studied and researched astronomy in universities, and in observatories on remote and beautiful mountain tops and in space. I explored the cosmos for its own sake, but I came to realise also that we are literally and metaphorically a part of the Universe, not apart from it. Just as the science of astronomy has done for me, these novels put humanity against the same backdrop: cosmic lives seen through women’s eyes.
Scottish astronomer and novelist Pippa Goldschmidt mixes astronomy and fiction in her novel. The book provides insight into the way that astronomy is carried out now in modern, remote, mountain-top observatories and in space (I can vouch for its verisimilitude). Jeanette is a young, lonely, junior researcher working in a university department dominated by male egos and incompetents. She puts academic politics and unsatisfactory affairs aside and travels to a mountain-top observatory in Chile for her research, making an unexpected discovery that throws her into conflict with her colleagues. Like her love life, her scientific life spirals out of her control: the Universe is ordered by science but her life and the lives of scientists are not.
A blackly comic campus satire combined with a heart-breaking family mystery, The Falling Sky brilliantly mixes fiction and astronomy into a fascinating, compelling, and moving narrative
Jeanette is a young, solitary post-doctoral researcher who has dedicated her life to studying astronomy. Struggling to compete in a prestigious university department dominated by egos and incompetents, and caught in a cycle of brief and unsatisfying affairs, she travels to a mountaintop observatory in Chile to focus on her research. There Jeanette stumbles upon evidence that will challenge the fundamentals of the universe, drawing her into conflict with her colleagues and the scientific…
I’ve been fascinated with the subjects of forgiveness and reconciliation most of my life. I’ve spent years researching people of the Old Testament, and as I read their stories, I see their need for these things in their relationships. It is a universal need of humans. Because I write about people who actually lived, I read books that deal with the things we all face. Truth is, time may change, but the human heart does not. I’m an amateur theologian and avid reader of books that will help me grow as a person and allow me to understand these ancient people who walked before us.
In The Prince and the Prodigal, Joseph has suffered a huge injustice from the people who should have loved him the most. Lysa’s book deals with the subject of familial hurt and pain, and though Joseph’s situation was not exactly the same, the principles of forgiving those who have wronged us even when we can’t forget what they did is the same.
Everyone experiences hurt or pain from another person. Unfortunately, the ones who hurt us the most tend to be the ones we love the most. I’ve read other books on forgiveness because it’s a subject I’ve had to deal with most of my adult life. When I picked up Lysa’s book on forgiving what you can’t forget, I did a lot of underlining because her words resonated with deep places in my own heart.
One underlined place says, “Destructive choices always affect more people than just the…
You deserve to stop suffering because of what other people have done to you.
Have you ever felt stuck in a cycle of unresolved pain, playing offenses over and over in your mind? You know you can't go on like this, but you don't know what to do next. Lysa TerKeurst has wrestled through this journey. But in surprising ways, she’s discovered how to let go of bound-up resentment and overcome the resistance to forgiving people who aren’t willing to make things right.
With deep empathy, therapeutic insight, and rich Bible teaching coming out of…
I’m an author and a romantic. Put the two together and it makes sense for me to write love stories. I’ve always been interested in relationships and fascinated by how complex our feelings make us when we fall in love. There’s a love story in all my books, but for the last three novels, a love story has been thestory. I’m a Londoner too, and I like it when a city becomes another character in a book, as I hope London has in The Central Line.
This is a slow-burn of a novel about two couples. Each character struggles to maintain their marriage under the pressure of children and modern life. Each tries to hold on to their own identity while existing inside a family. The novel looks at mental health, infidelity, cooking, and Black culture; it has a soundtrack, with songs that mean something to the characters and capture the essence of the time. The story is resonant with images of modern London. It asks a question about the centrality of the city and the anxiety that comes from leaving it.
Hailed as a "lyrical and glorious writer; a precise poet of the human heart" (Naomi Alderman), London-based author Diana Evans received international acclaim for Ordinary People. In a crooked house in South London, Melissa feels increasingly that she's defined solely by motherhood, while Michael mourns the thrill of their romance. In the suburbs, Stephanie's aspirations for bliss on the commuter belt compound Damian's itch for a bigger life. Longtime friends from the years when passion seemed permanent, the couples have stayed in touch, gathering for births and anniversaries. But as bonds fray, the lines once clearly marked by wedding bands…
