Fans pick 100 books like Wave Goodbye to Charlie

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 is the first of a trilogy of which any book in the series is worth reading. In this farce written long before marriage equality, a gay man hatches an outlandish scheme to throw a wedding, just for the expensive gifts. What follows is a comedy that incorporates blackmail and the mafia. You read this novel for pure pleasure, enjoying the clever one-liners while the plot spirals out of control. Flamboyant, camp, and ridiculously funny.

This is deliciously dark. It’s a tale about Eric, a twisted teenager who has tied up a home invader and is keeping him downstairs while his mother has left him alone. She’s busy trying to seek fame overseas. Eric keeps his teachers and his classmates unsettled while paying his daily expenses by entertaining older clients in Sydney’s richer suburbs. There is nothing charming about this story, yet its cast of disturbing eccentric characters makes this a real page turner.

To be fair, there is a love story featured in this novel, but it’s not at the heart of this tale. This is a historical piece full of captivating characterisation. Robin is a burly man who’s clumsy and unpopular in the small coastal town he lives in. But a horrendous storm is brewing, and Robin takes it upon himself to gather the townsfolk and get them to shelter at The Moth and Moon, the local pub. The world building is excellent. All characters are well realised. Most are eccentric. None are forgettable. And these elements make this tale truly charming.

As befitting the cheeky title, this book – about what it means to be, and to become, a gay man – is incisive, erudite, and a lot of fun to read. A pioneer of queer theory (and with this intervention, I suspect, a renegade from it), David Halperin is an unapologetic camp. He challenges received wisdom about how gay sensibility supposedly is misogynist, passé, irrelevant or dead, and his reflections on everything from Joan Crawford’s pizazz, to the current state of gay marriage, vacillate between being capacious and withering. “Sometimes I think homosexuality is wasted on gay people” he sniffs at one point, dispensing a delightful, and typically barbed, aperçu.

I stumbled over this book and soon found myself hooked. It’s a romance, yes, but the research into conflict and its effects put it up there on my list of thrillers. It’s not strictly speaking a thriller, it’s more of a military action story and romance, but the characters are wonderful. The way they react to the war zone conflict, the effect it has on the unit and the reporter embedded with them, it has a wonderful ring of truth. And that’s what I’m always looking for in a good romance, the ring of truth. You have to really feel the RPGs coming in, and Garrett does an amazing job of making you really feel it.

Gay American History was an epiphany for me and thousands of other gay men and women who were eager to learn about our history because books about it were few. I can’t describe the wonder I felt as I opened the book to thousands of rare documents (letters, diary entries, newspaper articles, book excerpts, medical and legal reports, etc.) that connected me to LGBT individuals who lived centuries earlier. Puritans, indigenous people, cross-dressing (“passing”) women, military personnel, artists of every ilk, government officials—their struggles, their defeats, and their victories, I learned, were no different in essence from those of the LGBT individual of the 21st Century. Gay American History is, in short, a treasure trove of information.

Benjamin Justice is a broken man—a former prize-winning journalist whose career (and life) has been shattered by the death of his lover and a scandal surrounding his best-known writing. Recruited by his former boss to assist an up-and-coming journalist, Ben finds himself investigating a murder that occurred outside a gay bar. The series is tightly written and casts a dark glamor across gay life in ’90s California.

This is a book I’m particularly excited to share because I was given the chance to read it in advance of its release. And I can say that it’s fabulous fun! A swords and sorcery tale brimming with assassins, magical music, battles for a throne, and dynamic lovers!

Balen is a gallant paladin who has made tough sacrifices to win his post as the king’s personal guard. One of the most painful of those sacrifices was leaving his witty and musically talented lover, Zavrius. So imagine his shock and chagrin after a series of mysterious assassinations leave Zaverius as the sole heir to the throne and Balen sworn to never leave his side! Awkward doesn’t even begin to describe it…but in the very best way — I promise!

The banter between the characters never failed to make me smile. And I adored that I could side with Zavrius for a… show more.

This is the first in a long-running series about two very different police officers in Baltimore. Cole builds two characters who are fire and ice, both wounded and broken by their pasts and unable to accept the future is anything but bleak. The investigations are fast-paced and clever, often touching on difficult subjects with a deft hand of a skilled writer. The romance is a very slow burn, but the growing attraction between these two men is worth the wait. These books are savage at times, but also lyrical and beautifully written. The characters, the city, the murders, they make everything so very real. Again, we learn what it’s like to be a gay man in a hetero-normative world and how difficult it is to succeed.