Welcome, Welcome, one and all. Wherever you are, whatever state of the world we’re all in right now, whatever uphill battles you’re facing, I hope this blog finds you in a place where you can find hope and joy somewhere, somehow. Now, more than ever, I find myself reaching for more and more queer stories in my everyday life. Sometimes, that’s in articles online, podcasts, documentaries, but more often, I’m reaching for books. Queer authors writing today are at the top of their game; they’re more experimental, more liberating, more challenging, more exciting. Against the backdrop of all that’s happening, they refuse to stop writing queer stories, and there’s something wonderful about that.
Rather than keep pouring my heart out about my love for queer literature, let’s get cracking with this summer’s reading list! Here are the cherry-picked titles I think you need to watch out for in the coming months. You can still find our full, rolling list of brilliant 2025 LGBTQIA+ releases on Bookshop (or via your sales rep), but for today, I want to give you a taste of what’s on offer this summer, and hopefully entice you to jump into some new (and very gay) stories with me.
Realistic Fiction
By Anton Solomonik
LittlePuss Press | 9781736716885 | Paperback | £15.99 | Out now
First up is Realistic Ficiton by Anton Solomonik. Over the past few years, I’ve found myself a little bit addicted to short story collections. I love getting a peek into a character’s internal life and external world for a limited number of pages, just becoming fully immersed for a brief time. Realistic Fiction is a great collection to get invested in. Anton’s writing is truly hilarious, as they put their characters into the most wacky places and situations, and give them even wackier relationships to gender. This excerpt from the blurb pretty much says it all:
Have you ever engaged in totally normal male behavior like: Stealing porn magazines? Hooking up with guys on Grindr? Attempting to work in an open-pit mine despite having no relevant job experience? Crossdressing as a woman? Attending Gnostic Mass? Running for government office? Then this is a book for you!
Worthy of the Event: An Essay
by Vivian Blaxwell
LittlePuss Press | 9781964322995 | Paperback | £15.99 | Out now
This essay collection recently got shouted out by Torrey Peters in the Guardian for being on her current reading rotation. She called Worthy of the Event a “library of experience” that is “smart and amusingly tart”. In Torrey Peters we trust!! She knows what she’s talking about, and the book does not disappoint. Set against the backdrop of trans life that begins with Vivian’s own transition in the 1960s, the collection’s seven essays take us on a journey across subjects, experiences, time and space. Philosophical, searching, and utterly distinctive, this is one for the armchair philosophers and the overthinkers.
A/S/L
By Jeanne Thornton
Dead Ink | 9781915368768 | Paperback | £11.99 | Out now
We’ve already been shouting about A/S/L by Jeanne Thornton for a short while now, you may have caught Dylan’s full review of the book here. In his words, this book is “an ambitious and challenging novel that offers something completely new in today’s publishing landscape, and is a must read for videogame lovers looking for gut-wrenching characters”. The book starts in 1998, when three chronically online teens start building the game Saga of the Sorceress. 18 years later, all three are on separate paths but are closer to each other than they realise, having never met IRL. Their quest with the sorceress is still far from finished, but what will happen if their lives collide once more?
Zipper Mouth
By Laurie Weeks
Cipher Press | 9781917008099 | Paperback | £10.99 | Out now
I can’t help but describe Zipper Mouth as a new, lesbian Beat novel. Maybe it’s because I watched Queer right before reading and had the Beats on my brain, but something about this book really hit the spot for the experimental and wild writing I often crave. In Zipper Mouth, Laurie Weeks captures the exuberance and mortification of a lesbian junkie as she navigates the chaos and horror of everyday life. Laurie metaphorically rips the skin off her protagonist, capturing a raw descent into addiction, unrequited love, and crisis. This is an outstanding and messy piece of fiction that would belong in a queer literary hall of fame if there was one.
Generation Queer
By Kimm Topping & illustrated by Anshika Khullar
Lee & Low | 9781643795201 | Hardback | £21.99 | Out now
Generation Queer takes inspiration from the civil rights activist Marian Wright Edelman, who once said “you can’t be what you can’t see”. The book helps us see what an activist future could hold, as it collects the biographies of thirty young trailblazers representative of a generation that values intersectional, collaborative social justice and who are working to build a world that values everyone. In Generation Queer, you’ll meet leaders, athletes, authors, artists, protestors, many figures with the bravery to formidably stand up against the status quo.
Iron Lung
By Kirstine Reffstrup & translated by Hunter Simpson
Peirene Press | 9781916806047 | Paperback | £12.99 | Out now
Iron Lung is a curious novel, translated from the original Danish by Hunter Simpson. During the 1950s polio epidemic, a girl is paralysed and placed on an iron lung to keep her alive. Forty years earlier, a child called “boy” grows up in an orphanage outside Budapest, their body transcending categories of boy or girl. A curious and powerful bond forms between them, stretching across time and space. Jo at Pages of Hackney recommended Iron Lung on their Instagram, and had this to say about Reffstrup’s characters: “With these characters she presents a tale of excluded queer bodies, the abuses that happen under the guise of medicine and the transformative possibility of found family. A truly inventive and powerful exploration of desire and a luminous hymn to the outsider.”
In Transit
By Brigid Brophy
Lurid Editions | 9781739744175 | Paperback | £12.99 | Out now
Lurid Editions are a publisher set on reprinting near-lost or forgotten queer books of the 20th Century, giving them a new life this side of the year 2000. You can recognise their books by this iconic magenta cover and their sweet little doe logo. In Transit is their newest release, and is one of the earliest examples of non-binary, trans experimental fiction. Brigid Brophy themselves was a fascinating novelist, essayist and political campaigner. Their novel is equally fascinating, telling the story of Pat – a heroic figure adrift at an airport and in search of gender. Due to an onset of ‘sexual amnesia’, Pat undergoes an uprooting and a journey of self-discovery that is at once camp, irreverent and revolutionary. In Transit is truly a forgotten queer classic, made new!
Disco Witches of Fire Island
By Blair Fell
Alcove Press | 9798892420341 | Paperback | £14.99 | Out now
You know I have to throw in something fun and fantastical into these lists, how else are we expected to maintain the queer endorphins we so desperately need right now?? If the name hasn’t already given away what this book is about, allow me to elaborate: It’s 1989, and Joe Agabian and his best friend Ronnie set out to spend their first summer working in the hedonistic gay paradise of Fire Island Pines. Joe is desperate to let loose and finally move beyond the heartbreak of having lost his boyfriend to the HIV/AIDS epidemic. There, he falls in with an unexpected crowd of secret disco witches, tasked with protecting the island from the tragedies ravaging their community. This is a dazzling fantasy with romance, community, sex and magic all rolled into one – very glittery – package!
Queer life and music have never been separate entities. Music gives us LIFE! It brings us into COMMUNITY! It feeds our SOULS and powers our all-important DANCE PARTIES! This May we’ve got two books that form tributes to the ways music moves through queer life: I Sing to Use the Waiting by Zachary Pace, and The Vinyl Diaries by Pete Chrighton.
I Sing to Use the Waiting:
A Collection of Essays about the Women Singers Who’ve Made Me Who I Am
By Zachary Pace
Two Dollar Radio | 9781953387424 | Paperback | £13.99 | Out now
Zachary Pace’s new memoir I Sing to Use the Waiting is a mixtape-inspired tribute, specifically delving into the women singers – from Cat Power to Madonna – who shaped their life as a young queer person discovering their own voice. Resonant and compelling, I Sing to Use the Waiting is a deeply personal rumination on how queer stories are abundant yet often suppressed, and how music may act as a comforting balm carrying us through difficult periods and decisions.
The Vinyl Diaries
By Pete Crighton
Random House Canada | 9781039011076 | Paperback | £18.99 | Out now
In The Vinyl Diaries, Pete Crighton recounts his coming-of-age in the early/mid 1980s and his late queer blooming in his 40s. With the AIDS epidemic devastating the queer community, and internal battles about sexuality, Pete spent his early adulthood curating a massive music library instead of exploring sex. Telling the story of his second coming-of-age and sexual awakening through his favourite artists and soundtracks, The Vinyl Diaries is a funny, thoughtful and wildly original story.
Trans-Galactic Bike Ride (2nd Ed.)
By Elly Blue
Microcosm Publishing | 9781648414183 | Paperback | £13.99 | Out now
Yay! Time for more queer joy! If you haven’t encountered Elly Blue’s numerous collections of bike-powered feminist and queer stories, then get on your helmet and oil up those gears! This second edition of the new collection, Trans-Galactic Bike Ride, collects stories of a future where trans and nonbinary people are the heroes. Featuring original stories from Hugo, Nebula, and Lambda Literary Award-winning author Charlie Jane Anders, UNITY author Elly Bangs, Kiera Jessica Bane, Ava Kelly, Juliet Kemp, Rafi Kleiman, Tucker Lieberman, Nathan Alling Long, Ether Nepenthes, Lane Fox Marcus Woodman, and Nebula-nominated M. Darusha Wehm, and an introduction to the new edition by Microcosm publisher Joe Biel. Providing much joy, adventure and throught-provocation, this is yet another fun read for your shelf.
a body more tolerable
Edited by jaye simpson
Arsenal Pulp Press | 9781551529677 | Paperback | £15.99 | 22nd May 2025
A body more tolerable is the new poetry collection from the award-winning Indigiqueer writer jaye simpson. The collection starts with poems that pull from a deep well of grief, one defined by the loss of family and of a childhood spent in the foster care system. For the next three sections of the collection, jaye continues to pull from this deep well of emotion, from pits of injustice, frustrated desires, trans identity, and self-divinised female rage. There is also a transformative power to the collection, one that sees the pain of desire and anger become visceral and animalistic embodied feelings. Having a queer body that desires, also means having a mind that yearns for queer utopia. In that transformation, readers will find the core of jaye’s poetry, and a powerful rebellious energy with which we can hope to move through the world.
WITCH
Edited by Michelle Tea
Cipher Press | 9781917008136 | Paperback | £13.99 | Out 22nd May 2025
Now, I did *try* to find some queer witch-related statistics to throw at you but, perhaps predictably (the research of queer witches being a fairly niche field), I couldn’t dig any up. But you don’t need a bunch of numbers to know about the tight grip witchcraft has on the queer community, just think back to the attendance sheet at your first lesbian lunar circle, and that should tell you all you need to know. Last year, Michelle Tea gave us the SLUTS anthology, now she’s back to give us WITCH!!! That’s right, an anthology of writing on witches that is fun, radical and camp as hell. If you’ve already encountered SLUTS, then you know the drill, but if you’re not familiar, then expect manifestoes, poetry, prose, myth, magic, essays, all sorts of brilliant writing from a stellar cast of writers, all exploring the figure of the witch as a radical archetype, in ancient and contemporary life.
Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon
By Annie Mare
Ace | 9780593817483 | Paperback | £16.99 | Out 3rd June 2025
Do you love sapphic time and space twister romances like One Last Stop? Well, Cosmic Love at the Multiverse Hair Salon is pretty much exactly what you’re looking for. Tressa Fay Robeson has never been shy, which is how she’s made a name for herself as an in-demand hair stylist and social media star.
When a misdirected text from a stranger leads to a flirty exchange, she surprises herself by suggesting an impulsive meetup. But the woman, Meryl, never shows. In an unforseen twist, Tressa’s mysterious ghosting date has been missing for a whole month, and her friends descend on Tressa’s salon to search for answers. Can they face up to the fact that they’re not dealing with a catfish, but a temporal paradox that needs fixing before Meryl vanishes for good.
The Future Was Color
By Patrick Nathan
Counterpoint | 9781640096998 | Paperback | £15.99 | Out 10th June 2025
Picked for numerous must-read and summer best lists for 2024, The Future Was Color is a dazzling novel set in the golden 50s and 60s of LA, as a Hungarian immigrant navigates 1950s Hollywood. When Madeline, a famous actress, offers George a writing residency at her estate in Malibu to work on the political writing he cares most deeply about, his world is blown open. Soon Madeline is carrying George like an ornament into a class of postwar L.A. society ordinarily hidden from men like him. With an immaculately-written story drenched in the LA sun, this is one perfect summer read to take with you to parks, beaches, and café terraces.
Bone Horn
By Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain
Cipher Press | 9781917008112 | Paperback | £11.99 | Out 19th June 2025
Lock in with me for a second, because I need you to read this: a sexy lesbian investigator, a famous Modernist couple, three countries, numerous archives, and a mysterious missing horn…. Yes, those are all of the juicy, tantilising details awaiting you in the pages of Bone Horn by Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain. A PI is caught up in grieving her partner, raising her son, and launching a PI business when a mysterious voice on the phone asks her to investigate a more unusual case: the mystery of Alice B. Toklas’ supposed horn. Diving into Parisian streets, dusty archives, internet searches, and lovers’ beds, Bone Horn is a lucid trip into one of history’s most famous lesbian power couples and the secrets they may or may not have kept.
Such Times
By Christopher Coe
Archway Editions | 9781648230912 | Paperback | £15.99 | Out 24th June 2025
In this hypnotically beautiful, haunting novel, Christopher Coe evokes a lost world of gay pleasure and privilege in the 1970s and early 80s, juxtaposed with the tragic years of loss afterwards. Over the course of Jasper and Timothy’s twenty-year relationship, Coe crafts a deeply moving work that elegantly, indelibly evokes a lost paradise and its tragic fall. Archway Editions spent years tracking down the rights and researching his life; this volume will also feature never-before-seen photographs and testimony from those who knew him — far more than a reissue, this is a celebration of a life and of an unjustly forgotten writer.
The Verifiers
By Jane Pek
Verve Books | 9780857309204 | Paperback | £10.99 | Out 30th June 2025
Claudia Lin is used to disregarding her fractious family’s model-minority expectations: she has no interest in finding either a conventional career or a nice Chinese boy. She’s also used to keeping secrets from them, such as that she prefers girls — and that she’s just been stealth-recruited by Veracity, a referrals-only online-dating detective agency. A lifelong mystery reader who wrote her senior thesis on Jane Austen, Claudia believes she’s landed her ideal job. But when a client vanishes, Claudia breaks protocol to investigate — and uncovers a maelstrom of personal and corporate deceit.
The Lavender Blade
By E. L. Deards
She Writes Press | 9781684633203 | Paperback | £16.99 | Out 8th July 2025
Calling fans of Gideon the Ninth!! This new queer speculative fiction is about what happens when a con artist exorcist becomes possessed for real… Colton and Lucian have a lot in common: both late-twenties, clever, have struggled with substance abuse, and find themselves penniless in Valencia. When Lucian discovers Colton’s fake exorcism con, he devises a scheme to turn that con into a business that can sustain them both. But when a real, powerful demon possesses Lucian, will they have what it takes to vanquish it to save their relationship — and Lucian’s life?
Buzzkill Clamshell
By Amber Dawn
Arsenal Pulp Press | 9781551529790 | Paperback | £16.99 | Out 24th July 2025
Another one for the poetry lovers – you’ve hopefully already encountered Amber Dawn’s brilliant Lambda Award-winning books including Sub Rosa, How Poetry Saved My Life and Where the world ends and my body begins. This new collection blends dark fantasy with confessional poetry to explore chronic pain, PTSD and lewd feminine power. Dawn’s poetic musings on trauma-informed eroticism is at once a fantastical and powerful read.
No Body, No Crime
By Tess Sharpe
Cinder House Publishing | 9781915368980 | Paperback | £10.99 | Out 14th August 2025
Dead Ink Books and their imprint Cinder House Publishing have been gathering steam as expert purveyors of subversive, dark and queer literature, now they’re hitting us hard with Tess Sharpe’s new heart-pounding thriller, set to release this August. It’s the year of the lesbian PI, because No Body No Crime tells the tale of Mel Tillman, a rural PI sitting on her own secret… a murder! Instead of losing sleep over her perfect crime, she can’t shake the thought of the girl who survived that night in the woods, the girl she fell in love with. No one’s seen Chloe for more than six years, but fate seems destined to bring the two women back together. Can they survive the sh*tstorm that might ensue if their lives collide once more?
