Here are 100 books that The Big Reveal fans have personally recommended if you like
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Queer community means what we make it mean—but in the end, we mostly have each other, with our varied histories and problems and capacity to care for our peers and harm them. Intergenerational community is a model for young people that the problems they’re facing aren’t new. I grew up in LGBT youth groups, in a generational moment just before gay marriage, PrEP, and increased access to healthcare for trans people transformed our sense of what “activism” and “solidarity” meant. As the political pendulum swings in the other direction, I think some of the best stories we can tell are ones where we aren’t individuals or couples in our own narrative bubbles.
I don’t usually love coming-out stories, since the coming-out narrative tends to replace anything else that happens for trans people, but this one shines—in part because Sasha Masha’s emergence precedes her contact with queer community, but only starts to actually makes sense in the context of knowing other gay and trans people.
It’s one of the only trans girl YA novels I know of, and it feels like it’s written for someone who is, like Sasha, half-out and tripping down the final steps. This is a fantastic book about how we may find our most real selves alone, but it might take a one-sided romantic friendship, a community showing of Querelle, or a couple old drag queens showing you their hallway of photos of Queer Icons to feel like you aren’t going crazy.
Alex feels like he is in the wrong body. His skin feels strange against his bones. And then comes Tracy, who thinks he's adorably awkward, who wants to kiss him, who makes him feel like a Real Boy. But it is not quite enough. Something is missing. Is the missing piece a part of Alex himself?
As Alex grapples with his identity, he finds himself trying on dresses and swiping on lipstick in the quiet of his bedroom. He meets Andre, a gay boy who is beautiful and unafraid to be who he is. Slowly, Alex begins to realize: Maybe…
I’ve adored holiday love stories ever since I was a kid watching Hallmark movies. There’s something about the magic of the holidays that makes two people falling in love even more special. That’s why I chose a contemporary holiday romance for my debut. And we see so much straight romance on TV and in bookstores, but I want to contribute to the queer community with my writing. I write a mix of sexualities;Make the Yuletide Gay features two lesbian women. All that to say, I just love queer holiday romances!
This one is technically New Year’s holidays, not Christmas specifically, but it swept me away with the meet cute and resulting fake dating. The main couple is adorable, and so is the side couple whose wedding they’re attending. Beau? Charms my pants off. The kisses (and more) steam up my glasses. I also appreciate the nonbinary representation; Alex is hilarious. It’s funny and cute and ugh, I just love it so much.
Flying solo at a wedding is the absolute last way Aubrey Gill wants to ring in the new year, so when she rolls into Whistler for the event, it’s with one goal in mind—survive the weekend. The Fates have other plans for her, however, as Beau Demers crashes into her life the moment she arrives. Young, gorgeous, and irresistibly charming, Beau quickly slips past her defenses, and Aubrey finds herself with a “date” for the weekend after all. It’s all for show, of course, except for the part where it’s the truest thing she’s ever known. And as the festivities…
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’m an accidental sports writer. While I played a few sports as a child and went as Sporty Spice for one ill-advised Halloween, I didn’t grow up on a steady diet of sports stories. I just didn’t get it. Sure, I heard stories of triumphant soccer seasons and rag-tag baseball teams, but they didn’t capture my interest. But then I grew up… and books became more diverse. I started revisiting sports novels after writing my debut novel. Seeing authors use sports as a way to explore queerness has changed my understanding of sports stories and given me a new appreciation for the genre. I can’t get enough!
This was the first published book I read with a nonbinary main character. That alone makes it one of the most personally important books I have ever read. The fact that I encountered it just after writing my own novel about a nonbinary figure skater made this beautiful book hit even harder.
It showed me that even though two books may have the same hook and some of the same basic ingredients, the execution can be diverse and take those ingredients in directions you never expected. It sparkles, both in its descriptions of figure skating and in its nuanced and honest exploration of identity. It also makes for an excellent read-aloud book.
Twelve-year-old Ana-Marie Jin, the reigning US Juvenile figure skating champion, is not a frilly dress kind of kid. So, when Ana learns that next season's program will be princess themed, doubt forms fast. Still, Ana tries to focus on training and putting together a stellar routine worthy of national success.
Once Ana meets Hayden, a transgender boy new to the rink, thoughts about the princess program and gender identity begin to take center stage. And when Hayden mistakes Ana for a boy, Ana doesn't correct him and finds comfort in this boyish identity when he's around. As their friendship develops,…
I write fantasy romance, or romantic fantasy, and one of my favorite things this little genre niche can do is use its otherworldly setting to re-examine our preconceived notions of romantic relationships. Polyamory exists in the real world, of course, so surely it should also exist in worlds with hauntings, spells, magic-powered giant mecha, and gods who intervene in mortal fates. Here are some books I have loved that make polyamory a fundamental part of their fantasy worldbuilding.
This beautiful and immersive novella is a winter-solstice-themed story about a woman and a genderqueer character who have nothing in common except for their mysterious, chaotic, magical, missingboyfriend. His magical experiment goes wrong and finding him requires them to cooperate. They make their way through a strange and wonderful set of clues that bring them closer together. Layla and Nat were both so richly drawn, and the contrast between their ordinary lives and the eerie, ineffable nature of the magic made the book so memorable for me. The whole cast is marvelously queer, and I laughed out loud a couple of times. A gem.
The world you know is underneath the substance of another, with cracks in the firmament that let the light of its magic in…
Layla and Nat have nothing in common but their boyfriend – enigmatic, brilliant Meraud – and their deep mutual dislike. But when Meraud disappears after an ambitious magical experiment goes wrong, they may be the only ones who can follow the trail of cryptic clues that will bring him safely home.
To return Meraud to this world, the two of them will confront every obstacle: the magic of the wild unknowable, a friendly vicar who's only concerned…
Charlie Jane Anders is the author of All the Birds in the Sky, which Time Magazine listed as one of the hundred best fantasy novels of all time. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night, Victories Greater than Death, and Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times By Making Up Stories. She organizes the long-running spoken word series Writers With Drinks, helps to organize tours of local bookstores, and also co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. Her short fiction has appeared in Tin House, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, Slate, and the Boston Review.
This book of speculative short fiction includes some of the best queer representation I've seen in ages. "A Silly Love Story" includes a gender-fluid character named Merion, and "Before We Disperse Like Star Stuff" includes a trans grad student named Min. Cipri manages to combine the surreal and illogical with a pervasive sense of warmth and humanity, which is a nearly impossible feat, and they make it look easy. Each story will leave you wondering what happens next, but the characters will also live on in your imagination long after you've turned the page.
Dark, irreverent, and truly innovative, the speculative stories in Homesick meditate on the theme of home and our estrangement from it, and what happens when the familiar suddenly shifts into the uncanny. In stories that foreground queer relationships and transgender or nonbinary characters, Cipri delivers the origin story for a superhero team comprised of murdered girls; a housecleaner discovering an impossible ocean in her least-favorite clients' house; a man haunted by keys that appear suddenly in his throat; and a team of scientists and activists discovering the remains of a long-extinct species…
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, 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.
What can I say about this book? It’s raw, brutal in places, tender in others, brimming with imagination and invention, and ultimately unforgettable. For myself, as a Western reader, it challenged my ideas of gender, identity, and personhood in its depiction of its central character, Ada, as an ogbanje, an Igbo spirit that is born into a human body as a kind of malevolent trickster. But Ada is an ogbanje who survives (something that rarely occurs), coming through traumatic experiences to forge a new identity that embraces plurality.
If you want to plunge into a tumultuous mind that spins through grief and tragedy, life and death, hope and rebirth, you should read this book. You should read this book if you want to step into the shoes of someone who may be quite unlike yourself or someone more like you than you might think. You should read this book if…
'Completely blew me away.' Daisy Johnson, author of Everything Under
'One of the most dazzling debuts I've ever read.' Taiye Selasi, author of Ghana Must Go
'I'm urging everyone to read it.' Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure
Ada has always been unusual. Her parents prayed her into existence, but something must have gone awry. Their troubled child begins to develop separate selves and is prone to fits of anger and grief.When Ada grows up and heads to college in America, a traumatic event crystallises the selves into something more powerful. As Ada fades into the background of her…
When I was a teenager, I didn’t have romance in my life. I was so extremely shy that I could barely look at people I thought were cute, let alone talk to them. I lived vicariously through books. Now that I’m older (and way less shy), I still love reliving that time of my life through books. How would I have reacted differently in the same situation? How would things have been different if I had been more outgoing? Only recently, I realized that I was queer, and I’ve been slowly dipping my toes into that world as well.
This was my first read of Jason’s work, and I was pleasantly surprised by just how much I loved it.
The mythology of the world was incredibly well-built, and I loved it when the humans got involved, too. The fat rep was incredible. It’s amazing to read about characters described like myself. The non-binary rep was excellent.
Overall, this was a fun read that I borrowed from the library and then bought because I loved it.
From Jason June, author of the breakout teen debut novel Jay's Gay Agenda, comes Out of the Blue, a stand-alone dual POV queer rom-com that asks if love is enough to change everything you've grown up believing. Perfect for fans of Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas and Deep Blue by Jennifer Donnelly.
Crest is not excited to be on their Journey: the month-long sojourn on land all teen merfolk must undergo. The rules are simple: Help a human within one moon cycle and return to Pacifica to become an Elder-or fail and remain stuck…
As a queer reader and writer of horror, I have little interest in anything that could be deemed “positive representation.” Horror is most compelling when it gets honest and ugly about the bad, selfish, cruel, or simply unwise choices people make when they’re truly scared–and that includes queer people. I love queer stories that aren’t primarily romantic or neatly resolved. I like messy groups of friends, toxic emotional entanglements, and family dynamics that don’t fit in a Hallmark card. These days there are lots of stories in other genres about queer people becoming their best selves, but horror also has space for us at our worst.
I love gore and emotional resonance, and this book delivers both by the bucketful. It’s well known as one of the gnarliest horror novels in recent memory, but what sometimes gets lost in the conversation is that it’s also one of the most poignant.
I can never resist a story whose central queer relationship is a friendship instead of a romance, and Beth and Fran’s friendship is deliciously fraught with desire, resentment, and the need to trust each other in order to survive in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. It’s not an entirely healthy friendship, but that wouldn’t be nearly as much fun.
Beth and Fran spend their days traveling the ravaged New England coast, hunting feral men and harvesting their organs in a gruesome effort to ensure they'll never face the same fate.
Robbie lives by his gun and one hard-learned motto: other people aren't safe.
After a brutal accident entwines the three of them, this found family of survivors must navigate murderous TERFs, a sociopathic billionaire bunker brat, and awkward relationship dynamics-all while outrunning packs of feral men, and their own demons.
Manhunt is a timely, powerful response to every gender-based apocalypse story that failed to consider the existence of transgender…
