The most recommended gay fantasy books

This is the sequel to one of my favourite books, The Miseducation of Evie Epworth, a funny but moving coming-of-age story with an irrepressible heroine.

In All about Evie, she’s grown up and making her way in the London of the 1970s, grappling with the world of work, and with first love. As someone who grew up in the 70s, it was brilliantly nostalgic, and meeting Evie again was like catching up with an old friend.

Just as in the first book, Matson Taylor conjures up a colourful but always utterly believable cast of characters, who I was sad to say goodbye to when I turned the last page.

I fell in love with this book from the very beginning.

When by-the-book case worker Linus Baker from the Department in Charge of Magical Youth comes to investigate a home for six dangerous magical children, he discovers an unlikely family in an unexpected place. As a mother, I was smitten by the insecure yet powerful children and was cheering for Linus to save them. I’ve been out of my element with kids too, Linus; I understand.

Best of all, I could feel the compassion and love on the pages of this amazing book.

Dark Factory is a very strange object, as it is both a book and an electronic device, as you can scan QR codes and click on links in order to get extra information through bonus chapters.

A tale of electronic music madness and extreme clubbing, Dark Factory focuses on the personalities and motives of a few central characters dedicated to starting a total revolution of the senses through their “art total” experiment.

This book really tickled me in all the good places as it tackles themes that readers can find in my own city-state novels, such as power, subversion, and the methodical destruction of reality.

Another vampire one I’m afraid. But trust me this is so worth your time. 

I read this for the first time when I was in college and well into my Goth phase, this book became my aesthetic afterwards. It’s a different take on vampires, explored through a few different groups of vampires. The characters are wonderfully portrayed and unique but what really hooked me into this book was the setting. It's got depth and feels like you could walk through the book and be in Missing Mile. 

This was the book that made me try Chartreuse.

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps, Wilson’s debut work, is another wonder among wonders.

It feels like an epic fantasy, but instead of following more Viking-blonde heroes with their magical swords, we’re following hired mercenaries to escort a caravan through dangerous lands.

And instead of the usual fantasy worlds descended from the Western European Middle Ages, we’re in one influenced by re-colonial Africa.

There are magical jungles and magical tigers, and violence and death, and an LGBT love story between smart, dedicated men.

It’s a character study worthy of a literary novel, but the love of words, and the masterful inclusion of various dialects, particularly a kind of medieval hip-hop slang, makes this a truly fascinating read.

To be honest, I was a little nervous of the blurb given the emphasis on fast cars and hard drugs, but this book ended up being the sweaty, sultry, sexy, Gothic horror book I didn't know I needed, way more dark academia than drag-racing drug-gang. I particularly appreciated the messy and authentic way in which the main character was allowed to grapple with his identity while processing his grief. I quite liked that no explicit labels were ever applied and that there was a more fluid approach to identity and sexuality in this book. So, if you're into slow-burn southern Gothic horror with lush and vivid prose and don’t mind a gruesome ghost or two, this book is for you!

This author always excels at depicting the hilarious pitfalls of navigating a labyrinthine, centuries-old bureaucracy. But for me, Zhao Yulan is the apex of her protagonists, who are charged with protecting the world on a low government salary.

He drinks on the job, chain-smokes, and devotes considerable on-the-clock time and resources to hitting on a hot, gay university professor named Shen Wei, all while attempting to solve a simple murder.

This story unfolds layer after breathtaking layer until lovers (Zhao Yulan always gets his man) are finally fighting a battle that shakes the pillars of creation. This book makes you want to dream bigger than you ever have before and fight hard for love.

I don’t read a lot of fiction, but sometimes only a novelist can flesh out how the world to come might look.

Dreamland has little to say about local food (apart from some neat rooftop gardening scenes), but it’s relevant as a kind of negative counterexample. Unless we get focused on realistic approaches to climate, food, energy, and justice right now this is the kind of world that we’ll summon into being – and it’s terrifying. The future it paints is based on trends that are all too evident in the here and now, adding to the sense of authenticity.

A propulsive plot, believable characters, and finely-crafted descriptive writing combine to make this an immersive experience in what we absolutely mustn’t let happen. 

Reentering the world of myth is something I haven’t done much since college.

Frankly, the characters weren’t identifiable to me, even if the stories were timeless and I could see them repeated in books, movies, and stories I loved. Then came The Song of Achilles and suddenly the fairy-tale characters took on more real lives, became real people. Even if they were Greek gods, they acted as mortals, the way we do.

The stories I tell have similar mythic characters, who act in ways that we don’t expect, who do things we could do, but don’t out of fear of ridicule or worse. But in the end, some succeed and some fail, just like in life.

A blend of humor and Chinese fantasy, The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System was my first brush with the Chinese sub-genre of transmigration novels, similar but different from Western portal fantasy or Japanese isekai. The main character ends up in a world not his own, and in the process of trying to make it better, comes rather close to destroying it. That dissonance between intention and results is something I absolutely love in my heroes. Competence is boring. I want to see (and write) messiness and complacency and efforts made that perhaps weren’t thought out all the way. That, to me, is not only humor but true heroism.