Here are 100 books that The Lost Language of Cranes fans have personally recommended if you like
The Lost Language of Cranes.
Shepherd is a community of 11,000+ 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.
I’ve been gay for as long as I can remember. I even told my mother, when I was five years old, that I was going to marry Hoss Cartwright (from the TV show Bonanza). But even knowing yourself that well doesn’t make it easy to actually beyourself, so I still had to come out to friends and family over a span of five or six years in my late teens and early twenties. And coming out is never easy, although it feels like a million bucks once you’ve done it. Also, it’s different for everyone, and having books like these I’ve recommended may not make it easier, but they show us that it can be done and that we’re not alone.
Having grown up gay in a small town in the South, this resonated with me as an out gay man in a big city in my twenties, because it got everything about being gay in a small Southern town right: the tone, the emotion, the terror, and most of all, it got how there are more of us in those small Southern towns than we realize at the time, and how leaving for bigger, “better” places isn’t always the answer.
A lonely eighteen-year-old boy growing up in the working-class town of Pryor, Oklahoma, Charlie Hope struggles to cope with his passionately religious mother, the death of his hard-drinking grandfather, his enigmatic late father, and his own confusion over sexual orientation. A first novel.
I have a passion for the themes and moods of this list because they explore so many parts of my emotions. They rile me, they work me up into a hot frenzy, they turn me on, they fascinate me, they bruise me, they heal me. I see myself in these books, and I feel that I understand other people. I’ve enjoyed (and still enjoy) reading these books published for free on blogs online, but now I want to write more and read more than I’ve done before. This list is a starting point, and I hope you enjoy them!
I love this book because it is raw. For those who dismiss erotic writing, because they think there are only a finite number of ways to write about sex and sexuality, I recommend this book. The raw and transformative way it writes about the attraction, longing, and pain of sex is joyous and agonising to read.
I love it because I don’t actually like either of the main characters, and liking the characters can often rescue a book from otherwise poor writing. I loved this book despite disliking the main characters.
“I remember the movement of his hips pressing against the pinball machine. This one sentence had me in its grip until the end. Two young men find each other, always fearing that life itself might be the villain standing in their way. A stunning and heart-gripping tale.” —André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
The critically acclaimed, internationally beloved novel by Philippe Besson—“this year’s Call Me By Your Name” (Vulture) with raves in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The Wall Street Journal,NPR, Vanity Fair, Vogue, O, The Oprah…
I have a passion for the themes and moods of this list because they explore so many parts of my emotions. They rile me, they work me up into a hot frenzy, they turn me on, they fascinate me, they bruise me, they heal me. I see myself in these books, and I feel that I understand other people. I’ve enjoyed (and still enjoy) reading these books published for free on blogs online, but now I want to write more and read more than I’ve done before. This list is a starting point, and I hope you enjoy them!
LONGLISTED FOR THE POLARI PRIZE 2021 A Guardian Book of the Year
'The highest talent at work' Sebastian Barry
'Beautiful ... A masterpiece' Attitude
Poland, 1980. Shy, anxious Ludwik has been sent along with the rest of his university class to an agricultural camp. Here he meets Janusz - and together they spend a dreamlike summer falling in love.
But with summer over, the two are sent back to Warsaw. Confronted by the scrutiny, intolerance and corruption of life under the Party, Ludwik and Janusz must decide how they will survive; and in their different choices, find themselves torn apart.…
Growing up queer and Italian in suburban New Jersey in the late 1960s and early 70s, it was the passionate love of food and family that got me through the tough times. I learned to cook from my mother and my grandmothers. I gardened and picked tomatoes with my grandfathers. There was always a pot of simmering tomato gravy and magic meatballs on the stove. My mother’s chicken parmigiana, my paternal grandmother’s homemade ravioli, my maternal grandmother’s stuffed clams, my great aunt’s baked chicken. As a writer, it became my mission to share these secret family recipes and the loving life lessons that saved me.
Through a series of tall tales told by an impish old lady to a lost, lonely woman visiting a nursing home, Fannie Flagg whisks the reader back to the deep south circa 1929 to an off-beat love story between two women who run a cozy café, and a rich mystery that gives the lost woman the courage to make heroic changes in her life.
This delectable book was a huge inspiration for me when writing my debut novel. I love how the wisdom-filled folk-tale-like chapters are quilted together to tell a larger story. And, like my own book, it contains a bucket full of tasty recipes!
Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, offering good coffee, southern barbecue, and all kinds of love and laughter—even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present will never be quite the same again.
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 personal wish is that Americans start reading a whole lot more books from other countries, especially books that shine a light on the queer experience around the world.
Ours is a global community, and we can’t fall into the trap of thinking diversity only exists in our own country and language. Lucas Rocha’s novel tells the story of three Brazilian teens who are dealing with the impact of HIV in their own unique ways. It’s engrossing, tender, and transporting.
Anyone who loves this should also seek out the work of Vitor Martins, and should demand more books in translation so we can travel through literature.
Henrique has had HIV for three years. Ian has just tested positive. Victor got with Henrique last night and thinks he might have it.
Ian, Victor and Henrique must navigate treatment, friendship and love, and eventually learn to trust each other.
Because with judgement and ignorance lurking round every corner, the real challenge isn't the disease - it's other people.
Brazilian author Lucas Rocha unveils the common misconceptions and prejudices that still surround HIV in the twenty-first century, showing how far we've come while shining a light on just how far we have yet to go.
I have a passion for the themes and moods of this list because they explore so many parts of my emotions. They rile me, they work me up into a hot frenzy, they turn me on, they fascinate me, they bruise me, they heal me. I see myself in these books, and I feel that I understand other people. I’ve enjoyed (and still enjoy) reading these books published for free on blogs online, but now I want to write more and read more than I’ve done before. This list is a starting point, and I hope you enjoy them!
I love this book because line after line and paragraph after paragraph floor me.
"People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all—a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named—but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not."
It lifts you with perfect prose and then hammers you with something so traumatic and blunt that you need to take a breath. At times, it's too good–like, annoyingly good. Its design, thought process, execution, implementation, weaving, cornering, boundary setting, battling, and emotions are just so well executed. I will never write as well as this, but I will try harder…
When David meets the sensual Giovanni in a bohemian bar, he is swept into a passionate love affair. But his girlfriend's return to Paris destroys everything. Unable to admit to the truth, David pretends the liaison never happened - while Giovanni's life descends into tragedy.
United by the theme of love, the writings in the Great Loves series span over two thousand years and vastly different worlds. Readers will be introduced to love's endlessly fascinating possibilities and extremities: romantic love, platonic love, erotic love, gay love, virginal love, adulterous love, parental love, filial love, nostalgic love, unrequited love, illicit love,…
I became aware of the struggles of the LGBTQ community as a 22-year-old touring the Dachau concentration camp in Germany, where hundreds of gay men were imprisoned—my mother was a Holocaust survivor who survived Auschwitz. A month later, in October 1978, after I returned to San Francisco, Supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were murdered. As a hippie, San Francisco seemed extremely tolerant, but after the murders, I realized there was a monumental struggle for “unalienable rights” in the LGBTQ community. I started photographing LGBTQ political events and, for six years, documented the “gay liberation movement” as it exploded across the streets of New York and San Francisco.
I found this to be a phenomenally original and imaginative dive into the tragic period of the AIDS epidemic.
I was gripped by the complex relationship between the different couples, the relationships between the characters, and “queerness” even if they were not. I learned about that dark period in American social history through the entwined lives of a few emotionally charged and engrossing characters.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama Angels in America: A Gay Fantasia on National Themes includes Part One, Millennium Approaches and Part Two, Perestroika
“Glorious. A monumental, subversive, altogether remarkable masterwork…Details of specific catastrophes may have changed since this Reagan-era AIDS epic won the Pulitzer and the Tony, but the real cosmic and human obsessions—power, religion, sex, responsibility, the future of the world—are as perilous, yet as falling-down funny, as ever.” –Linda Winer, Newsday
"A vast, miraculous play... provocative, witty and deeply upsetting... a searching and radical rethinking of American political drama." - Frank Rich, New York Times
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 the writing style of this book. I felt like I was sitting across from Luc, sharing coffee and listening to him tell me about his life like I would with a true, real-life friend.
And just like I would in real life, all throughout the book, I found myself shaking my head at some of Luc’s decisions and laughing with him when he found himself way over his head. So when Oliver came into his life and clearly became someone who was so obviously good for him, I was thrilled for my new friend.
"It's a fun, frothy quintessentially British romcom about a certified chaos demon and a stern brunch daddy with a heart of gold faking a relationship."-New York Times bestselling author Talia Hibbert AMAZON BEST BOOK OF THE MONTH Named a best book of the year by Oprah Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Goodreads, The Washington Post, and more! WANTED: One (fake) boyfriend Practically perfect in every way Luc O'Donnell is tangentially-and reluctantly-famous. His rock star parents split when he was young, and the father he's never met spent the next twenty years cruising in and out of rehab. Now that his dad's making…
Long ago I lived in a world of blackouts and food rationing and German planes threatening overhead, children dying in epidemics of polio and TB, and food on the dinner table not always certain. In that world, homosexuality was a criminal and psychiatric term and queer men were objects of ridicule, tragic sissies it was normal to mock as sick monsters who could go to jail for their forbidden behavior. I’ve listed some of the books that trace part of the long journey queer men took until it felt reasonably safe to discuss queerness nonjudgmentally. Question: In how many American schools, even today, would a teacher be banned from assigning one of these books?
My first sexual experience after I moved to London in 1957 was with a slightly older man I met at one of the parties I got invited to after my book was published. When we got to his flat I knew enough to take my clothes off and lie down on the bed, but what was I supposed to do then? Clueless, I lay there like a stick of celery. “You’re not gay,” he kept repeating. “Yes I am,” I kept repeating, but didn’t know how to prove it.
Too many years later, in 1966, The Song of the Loon filled in the blanks of how gay men actually had sex. It’s very well-written explicit erotica, a backwoods fantasy about impossibly handsome masculine men living far from those city gays corrupted by shame and disappointment. Song is no quick potboiler. It’s a gay author’s well-realized attempt to bring to life…
“More completely than any author before him, Richard Amory explores the tormented world of love for man by man . . . a happy amalgam of James Fenimore Cooper, Jean Genet and Hudson’s Green Mansions.”—from the cover copy of the 1969 edition
Published well ahead of its time, in 1966 by Greenleaf Classics, Song of the Loon is a romantic novel that tells the story of Ephraim MacIver and his travels through the wilderness. Along his journey, he meets a number of characters who share with him stories, wisdom and homosexual encounters. The most popular erotic gay book of the…
As a writer of gay mystery, I try to read as widely as I can—both to learn from writers who have gone before me and for the pleasure of the books themselves. I’m always thrilled when I find writers like the ones I’ve shared in this list: people who think deeply and carefully about the complexities (and, occasionally, the agonies) of being a gay man, while, at the same time, weaving in the suspense and puzzles inherent in mysteries.
Fadeout is the first book in Hansen’s Dave Brandstetter mysteries. The protagonist, an openly gay insurance investigator in 1970s California, is convinced that a man who has been reported dead is actually still alive, and he must hurry to find him. Another classic in the gay mystery canon, Fadeout is vividly noir, grittily honest, and rejects cliches and stereotypes in a way that is still shocking over fifty years later.
'After forty years, Hammett has a worthy successor' The Times
Radio personality Fox Olsen seemed to have it all: devoted wife, adoring fans, perfect life. When his car is found crashed in a dry river bed, all of California mourns. But there is no body...
Insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter is hired to dig a little deeper. And the more he looks into Fox Olsen's life, the more it seems as if he had good reason to disappear.
Fadeout is the first novel starring Dave Brandstetter - one of the best fictional PIs in the business, and one of the first…
Interested in
gay men,
Manhattan,
and
sexual orientation?
11,000+ authors have recommended their favorite books and what they love about them.
Browse their picks for the best books about
gay men,
Manhattan,
and
sexual orientation.
