100 books like The Swimming-Pool Library

Like a hipster Brooklyn transgender Sex and the City, this novel is a chatty, hilarious, and moving look at queer folks grasping for parenthood and family in a world where all the rules have been thrown out.

The book’s narrator, transwoman Reese, takes us on this ride with such sardonic, poignant insight about the world she lives in that we begin to feel like we live in it, too. When Reese’s ex, Ames—who has detransitioned from his former transwoman identity, Amy—gets his straight female boss pregnant, the three of them begin negotiating how they might raise the child together.

But the novel’s true power lies in how Reese explains her life and her friends to us—bravely refusing to portray trans people as angelic role models and instead offering something deeper and more endearing: showing them as real people.

This remarkable novel, patterned lightly after James Joyce’s Ulysses, is the tale of Carlotta Mercedes, a Black and Hispanic transgender woman who returns to her Brooklyn neighborhood after serving decades in prison because she was in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Unfolding almost in real time over the 2015 July 4 weekend, the book has a chaotic, madcap energy and toggles seamlessly throughout between a traditional third-person narrative and the hilarious, heartbreaking first-person monologue inside Carlotta’s brilliant, bonkers head.

Reading this novel is like getting on a nonstop rollercoaster with a narrator who will crack you up and make you root for her right up to the ecstatic final page.

One of the most kinetic books I read a few years back and told in a kind of beautiful, white-hot stream of consciousness, Sketchtasy is the tale of young, genderqueer Alexa and her friends navigating pleasure and survival in mid-90s, AIDS-battered Boston.

This is no “model LGBTQ person” book; Alexa and her friends, scarred by trauma and addled by every recreational drug on the planet, are creatures of the night, showing off outrageous looks in the clubs and turning tricks to pay the rent and put food in their mouths.

It’s a breakneck-paced look at both exuberant and terrified young queer people right before HIV went from being a near death sentence to a chronic manageable disease. 

Set at the height of the Trump era, this very New York City novel follows its title character, a lesbian former cop turned heroin addict who’s now fresh out of rehab and, in her new job as a private investigator, stumbles onto a murder she becomes determined to solve.

Maggie is a total mess—barely able to navigate a cell phone or the Internet, holding on for dear life at her Narcotics Anonymous meetings, stalking her ex outside her window in the pouring rain, and desperate to have her daughter, whom she was raising with her ex, back in her life.

The novel’s promise of a tight murder mystery kind of unravels, but it doesn’t even matter because Maggie’s fumbling, stumbling effort to put her life back together in a disconcertingly sleek new version of downtown Manhattan is a voyeuristic joy to follow.

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… show more.

This novel weaves three unique stories told by three very distinctive gay men who live in London at completely different periods of time. What unites them? Internalised homophobia, something as a gay person I remember from a long time ago. Each character yearns for someone. Each in a distinct way. Rent boy, Jack, longs for his regular client, Oscar Wilde. Lonely artist Colin desires the model he paints while staying closeted in the 1950s. And David’s desire lands him in prison in the 1980s.

Each story travels at the same pace with each character reflecting similar highs and lows. And you don’t have to be gay to identify with this well-written novel.

This was only published way after Forster’s death–and I can quite see why: it would have whipped up a storm of unimaginable controversy with its story of homosexual love between two Cambridge students and then (steady yourself!) one of those students in later life and a rough-and-ready groundsman.

Forster wrote this in 1913/14, revised it in the 1930s and again in the 1950s, died in 1970, and Maurice finally appeared in 1971. So the book, which concerns hiding, was deeply hidden for over half a century. Forster is sentimental in terms of love and brutal in terms of fate.

Love bucks polite society’s norms in the face of the danger of arrest, public scandal, and disgrace. But such love is so delicate and dangerous that any affront to it has to be met with the most decisive action to protect everyone involved–even if the price is loneliness and a life-long… show more.

I’m always a sucker for something sweet, wholesome, and low-to-no stakes when it comes to my gay manga.

It’s a sweet and wholesome story about a mom who realizes her eldest son is gay, but gives him the space, respect, and privacy to come out in his own time. She also makes a point to defend her son’s sexuality without outing him to others. It made me crack up because I remember being that eldest son - thinking I was slick at hiding my sexuality, when I really wasn’t.

I also love how the mom gives her son the space he needs and respects his privacy. A super mom, for sure!

I was taken down a rabbit hole, exploring other aspects of 19th and 20th-century Irish and British gay culture.

This very comprehensive biography of Ireland’s leading playwright whose many amusing quotes are now part of everyday language deals predominantly with his sexuality, going into considerable detail in parts. Wilde was, as per his name, pretty wild!

His life was a true roller-coaster, from the height of his fame with many books, poetry, and stage productions making him a household name worldwide. Yet he was a troubled soul and the author of the biography has researched his subject intensively and has delivered possibly the ultimate work about this notable gay icon.

This novel is everything—a school story, a coming-of-age story, a fish-out-of-water story as well as being chock-full of swords and sorcery. It follows genius mechanist Kiram Kir-Zaki as he journeys far away from his home to attend the prestigious Sagrada Academy where he hopes to make the connections that will earn him a place in the king’s court. Instead, he finds himself shunned on account of his race and compelled to share a room with a man who is widely believed to have no soul. If two hot outcasts being forced to share a room and eventually falling so deeply in love that death itself cannot separate them, then this book is your cup of tea.