Here are 100 books that The First to Die at the End fans have personally recommended if you like
The First to Die at the End.
Shepherd is a community of 10,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Shepherd is reader supported. When you buy books, we may earn an affiliate commission.
Growing up, I never saw myself fully represented in fiction. I only glimpsed pieces of my younger self reflected in novels about queer or queer-coded characters, and so I made it my life’s mission to give teenage me exactly what he wanted. As a YA author whose queer male readers are not always young adults, the message I get the most is, “I wish I had this as a teen.” While I often feel this way as well, I still know that reading the five books I recommended (as well as my own) at any age is life-affirming for queer men like myself.
Stonewall Honor Book * A Time Magazine Best YA Book of All Time
"A book for warriors, divas, artists, queens, individuals, activists, trend setters, and anyone searching for the courage to be themselves.”—Mackenzi Lee, New York Times bestselling author of The Gentleman’s Guide to Vice and Virtue
It’s 1989 in New York City, and for three teens, the world is changing.
Reza is an Iranian boy who has just moved to the city with his mother to live with his stepfather and stepbrother. He’s terrified that someone will guess the truth he can barely acknowledge about himself. Reza knows he’s…
As I mention in my book picks, I’m a romantic. I love stories with characters who have big emotions, even more so if they face unique challenges. And I have always loved reading – I was the kid lugging 12 books home from the library. (Technically, we were only allowed six at a time, but I used my brother’s library account and checked out his share too!) Reading that many books, I discovered that a lot of the plots get repeated, so I’m always on the lookout for something fresh. In my previous Young Adult novels, I’ve tried to put my own stamp on romance by focusing on queer protagonists and kids of color.
I come from a fat family. The healthiest version of me is still fat to some people.
Growing up, I worried that no one would like me (or love me!) because of my size. I would have killed for a book like Fat Chance, Charlie Vega, whose protagonist shares those fears, even as she falls for a cute classmate and navigates the opinions of friends and family.
In a society that often excludes people her size, Charlie gets to be the lead in a fresh spin on high school love stories.
Coming of age as a Fat brown girl in a white Connecticut suburb is hard. Harder when your whole life is on fire, though.
A NEW ENGLAND BOOK AWARD WINNER!
Charlie Vega is a lot of things. Smart. Funny. Artistic. Ambitious. Fat.
People sometimes have a problem with that last one. Especially her mom. Charlie wants a good relationship with her body, but it's hard, and her mom leaving a billion weight loss shakes on her dresser doesn't help. The world and everyone in it have ideas about what she should look like: thinner, lighter, slimmer-faced, straighter-haired. Be smaller. Be…
As I mention in my book picks, I’m a romantic. I love stories with characters who have big emotions, even more so if they face unique challenges. And I have always loved reading – I was the kid lugging 12 books home from the library. (Technically, we were only allowed six at a time, but I used my brother’s library account and checked out his share too!) Reading that many books, I discovered that a lot of the plots get repeated, so I’m always on the lookout for something fresh. In my previous Young Adult novels, I’ve tried to put my own stamp on romance by focusing on queer protagonists and kids of color.
In elementary school, I was obsessed with weddings—I drew pictures of them, made plans for my own someday, and had serious opinions about the ones I attended.
I loved Neil’s protagonist Felicity for her intense belief that her mom’s wedding needs to be perfect. But the combination of anxiety and her unwillingness to hear what her mom actually wants gets in the way. But, for asexual Felicity, wedding planning is still easier than figuring out what comes next with Nancy, her friend with crush vibes.
Sixteen-year-old Felicity Becker is always a girl with a plan. Next up: winning the social committee chair position at school so she can put her many ideas into action. But when she unexpectedly loses, she's thrown for a loop - and then another, that evening, when her mom's boyfriend proposes. She and her mom may be very different, but it's always been them against the world. Now, everything is going to change.
Still, Felicity can't help but be excited by the wedding planning that's suddenly before her. Even more so when her mom agrees to travel to Vermont for the…
As I mention in my book picks, I’m a romantic. I love stories with characters who have big emotions, even more so if they face unique challenges. And I have always loved reading – I was the kid lugging 12 books home from the library. (Technically, we were only allowed six at a time, but I used my brother’s library account and checked out his share too!) Reading that many books, I discovered that a lot of the plots get repeated, so I’m always on the lookout for something fresh. In my previous Young Adult novels, I’ve tried to put my own stamp on romance by focusing on queer protagonists and kids of color.
If you love music and you love romance, you’re going to adore Love Radio.
I’m a romantic from way back, so it was a lot of fun watching Prince try to impress Dani with three dates (which he says is all he needs to get her to fall in love with him). I also enjoyed how hard she made it for him—a girl who knows what she wants for her future, she wasn’t about to get played.
This was one of my favorite books of 2022 in any category.
“Readers won’t be able to get enough of these dope-ass characters.” —Elizabeth Acevedo, author of Clap When You Land
Hitch meets The Sun Is Also a Star in this “mega swoon-worthy, effortlessly cool” (Casey McQuiston, New York Times bestselling author) novel about a self-professed teen love doctor with a popular radio segment who believes he can get a girl who hates all things romance to fall in love with him in only three dates.
Prince Jones is the guy with all the answers—or so it seems. After all, at seventeen, he has his own segment on Detroit’s popular hip-hop show,…
I grew up feeling invisible in media, and absent in history. My Iranian history was hidden from me by a culture that believed shielding young people from trauma was the right thing to do, and my queer history was hidden from me by a homophobic time. I’m passionate about the power of seeing yourself represented in storytelling and in history, and have devoted much of my life to telling queer stories, and queer historical stories. As a parent, as a queer Iranian storyteller, as a passionate believer in art as a tool for empathy, these are books I think will both entertain readers and inspire them to love their fellow humans a little more.
My novel received a Stonewall Honor, which was one of the great thrills of my life. But the winner of the Stonewall Award that year was The Black Flamingo by Dean Atta, and let me tell you, this is the book you want to lose to, the book you want to laugh to and cry to and cling to.
I’ve read it multiple times. Written in brilliant poetic verse, it’s a celebration of Blackness and queerness and all the complex emotions that make us human. I love it and cherish it, and you will too.
'Atta's bold verse novel calls to its readers to find their own blazing, performative inner truth' - Guardian
WINNER OF THE STONEWALL BOOK AWARD
A boy comes to terms with his identity as a mixed-race gay teen - then at university he finds his wings as a drag artist, The Black Flamingo. A bold story about the power of embracing your uniqueness. Sometimes, we need to take charge, to stand up wearing pink feathers - to show ourselves to the world in bold colour.
One of my favorite bits of praise for my books was Michael Silverblatt, of KCRW, saying, "There is no one else like her—she invents a new improvised form for her fiction." The last five books of fiction I’ve written (my total is nine) have been webs, spinning out from one character to another, across different times and places. It lets me be intimate and distant both at once. So I’ve naturally loved reading writers who’ve done this in various ways. People like to quote John Berger saying, “Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one,” and I’m in line with that.
The novel is set in three end-of-century time-frames—1893, 1993, and 2093. In the opening, set in a mansion on Washington Square in New York, we discover we’re in an America where same-sex marriage has been legal for a long time, and a young man is about to run off with a suitor his father distrusts (a new version of a Henry James plot). The next section is in Hawaii, the colonized Paradise, where descendant characters (with the same set of names, juggled) stumble and grab what they can of freedom and love. My favorite section is the last, where characters with those recurring names are in a New York of “cooling suits” and “decontamination chambers” and totalitarian rule. This is a wild and really quite brilliant book, whose sprawling parts are fueled by a searing vision.
'This magisterial follow-up to A Little Life offers three books in one . . . Yanagihara weighs up damage and privilege - social, emotional, political, colonial in a gripping, immersive ride through alternative Americas.' - The Guardian 'Best Reads For Summer'
'After the painfully affecting [A Little Life] To Paradise gives us three stories far apart in space and time but each unique in their power to summon the joy and complexity of love, the pain of loss. I'm not sure I've ever missed the world…
After writing a novel about the toll true crime can take on victims’ loved ones and the risk it runs of glamourizing killers while overshadowing victims, I’ve been on the hunt for true crime books that don’t fall into these traps. The titles on this list showcase beautiful writing and tell compelling stories without dehumanizing the victims or glamourizing the perpetrators.
In 1991, a maintenance worker at a Pennsylvania rest area discovered a man’s head in a trash barrel.
Even though he hadn’t touched blood, people suggested the worker should take an AIDS test. Green’s exceptional book opens with this moment, dropping the reader into early ‘90s AIDS panic and the brutal murders of a string of gay and bisexual men from Manhattan.
Green fleshes out the victims’ lives, showing how homophobia was their constant companion, even in the way the police and media treated their eventual murders. Diligently researched and compassionately written, Green’s book is a page-turner that never dehumanizes its victims or glorifies their killer.
**WINNER OF THE EDGAR® AWARD FOR BEST FACT CRIME**
A "terrific, harrowing, true-crime account of an elusive serial killer who preyed upon gay men in the 1990s." -The New York Times (Editor's Pick)
"In this astonishing and powerful work of nonfiction, Green meticulously reports on a series of baffling and brutal crimes targeting gay men. It is an investigation filled with twists and turns, but this is much more than a compelling true crime story. Green has shed light on those whose lives for too long have been forgotten, and rescued an important part of American history." -David Grann, #1…
On paper, it would be easy to think I’m the wrong person to recommend these books and write my own, which would fit easily onto this list. But as a lover of love and someone who has always enjoyed the company of men, particularly gay men, this is an area I have passion for - seeing hopeful and authentic love stories written for the masses.
I loved this book from page one because I instantly wanted to be the main character, Max Moody’s, friend. He’s incredibly relatable and has impeccable taste in music.
His love interest, Chasten, was charming and sweet, and the combination of their personalities made them easy to root for. Plus, I laughed out loud and smiled all the way through their love story.
"Bursting with laughs and so much love, Sidney Karger's debut novel delivers a truly refreshing spin on the romantic comedy…A big-hearted, feel-good summer escape."—Anderson Cooper, #1 New York Times bestselling author and journalist
When two best men in a wedding party fall for each other, they realize love isn’t a piece of cake in this hilarious and heartfelt romantic comedy debut by screenwriter Sidney Karger.
Max Moody thought he had everything figured out. He’s trying to live his best life in New York City and has the best friend a gay guy could ask for: Paige. She and Max grew…
I started my career teaching high school. I attended amazing professional development institutes, where scholars showed me how the stories I’d learned and then taught to my own students were so oversimplified that they had become factually incorrect. I was hooked. I kept wondering what else I’d gotten wrong. I earned a Ph.D. in modern US History with specialties in women’s and gender history and war and society, and now I’m an Associate Professor of History at Iowa State University and the Coordinator of ISU’s Social Studies Education Program. I focus on historical complexity and human motivations because they are the key to understanding change.
If you’ve ever wondered about where the terms “coming out,” “tea room,” or “fairy” came from, this book has the answers. But more importantly, this book showed me the extent to which my preconceived notions about the relationship between gender and sexuality were simply wrong.
Chauncey’s careful and readable reconstruction of gay communities in early twentieth-century New York illustrates very clearly that ideas of masculinity and deviance and the meanings attached to sex between men are socially constructed and change over time.
His story also showed me how much history can hide in plain sight and how there are still so many stories left to tell.
The award-winning, field-defining history of gay life in New York City in the early to mid-20th century
Gay New York brilliantly shatters the myth that before the 1960s gay life existed only in the closet, where gay men were isolated, invisible, and self-hating. Drawing on a rich trove of diaries, legal records, and other unpublished documents, George Chauncey constructs a fascinating portrait of a vibrant, cohesive gay world that is not supposed to have existed. Called "monumental" (Washington Post), "unassailable" (Boston Globe), "brilliant" (The Nation), and "a first-rate book of history" (The New York Times), Gay New Yorkforever changed how…
When I was nine years old, I joined a book club. The members were me and my dad. He’d throw detective books into my room when he was done with them, and I’d read them. We’d never discuss them. But that’s why hard-boiled detective fiction is comfort food for me and how I know it so well. I’ve been binging on it most of my life and learning everything the shamus-philosophers had to teach me. Now I write my own, the Ben Ames series, for the joy of paying it forward.
You know what I like about Donald Strachey? His boyfriend. I’m kidding—Strachey’s fine.
He’s a smart, tough detective in the hard-boiled tradition so of course I like him, but do you ever think way more of someone because they had the good taste to pick the partner they did? Timothy Callahan is a Jesuit-educated political aide, former Peace Corps volunteer and one of those characters who gets called a “moral centre” because they are one.
I was half in love with him before he (accurately) dissed Mother Teresa but I adored him after that. I came to the Strachey books for canny, realistic and never twee gay detective fiction but I’ve stayed for Timmy. He’s a soothing, reaffirming, hilarious wonder and you never know—he might smack-talk Gandhi next.
Shocked to discover the body of the grandson of the godfather of Albany's political machine in his car, P.I. Donald Strachey knows he is in for trouble. But when he learns that the murder victim left a $2.5 million legacy with instructions that it be used to destroy that machine, along with a personal letter to Strachey asking for his help, his suspicions are confirmed. Faced with power-brokers at all levels, Albany's only gay P.I. tries to fulfill the dead man's mission-with his own survival at stake.
Interested in
gay men,
gay teenagers,
and
New York State?
10,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
gay men,
gay teenagers,
and
New York State.
