2026 in Queer Books (so far)

June has come and gone, but I am still gay. As such, I wanted to share every single queer book I’ve read this year (well… so far).

Six months ago I moved across the world. I packed 8 heavy books into a carry-on, 28 jackets into an oversized suitcase, and started this new chapter.
I really thought it would be like pressing reset, but it has actually felt like levelling up. The adjustment has been way more internal than I expected. The challenge hasn’t been my new life’s logistics, but the personal growth that’s been necessary. I’ve stretched, changed, ripened, and I’ve loved every second of it.

Personal aside, the publishing ecosystem here has been a very positive adjustment. Books are part of the fabric of London—they’re everywhere you look, they’re recognized as an important part of the cultural landscape, and I feel exposed to a much wider breadth of stories. Used books, indie publishers with strong footholds, translated fiction, it’s all way more within reach here.

With this new reality shaping my reading, I assumed I’d have different findings when it came to queer reads. I’ve been pushing my tastebuds out of their comfort zone, focused on other types of stories, and yet… I’m still reading as queer as ever.

So, let’s break down my queer reads:

In the first 6 months of the year, I read 51 books
22 of those were queer stories (19 written by out queer writers).
This number consisted of 18 fiction reads and 4 miscellaneous reads (nonfiction, poetry, short story collections etc.).

I’m going to go through all of them here highlighting my favourites, so buckle up!

Is This a Cry for Help? by Emily Austin
This book is about a queer librarian, Darcy, who returns to work after a mental health episode. She tries to ease back into her world but is confronted with cancel culture, grief, guilt, morality, and a mob of conservatives outside her workplace.
Emily Austin writes about mental ill queer women like nobody else. Her character studies are exacting, the elements of the contemporary world she’s able to weave in are always compelling, and the texture of her voice is so singular.

Middle Spoon by Alejandro Varela
This is an epistolary novel told entirely through emails. It follows a gay man with a loving husband, two children, and a boyfriend who has just dumped him. His frenzied rumination after the breakup recounts their life together, his other life with his husband, the narrator’s quest to queer the family dynamic, and also pokes holes in the fabric of modern society in America.

Peaces by Helen Oyeyemi
This whimsical novel follows a gay couple as they board a sleeper train. From there, the story gets slippery and confusing. It challenges reality, memory, and truth. Reading this is exactly how I imagine being a passenger on one of these trains to be: Walking unsteadily through a long hallway and peering into a bunch of different people’s cabins, only seeing snippets of their lives.

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
This book is set in a near-future dystopian version of our world where resources are dwindling. The narrator is a chef (which is now a functional role, not a creative one) who gets hired to work in a mysterious compound for an elite few. There’s a hint of mystery to this literary novel, but mostly it explores power and wealth in the face of a global climate crisis.

No God but Us by Bobuq Sayed
It’s the story of two Afghan men who, for very different reasons, find themselves in Istanbul. They circle each other as they find community with a group of queers. They connect over their similarities and clash over their differences. There’s an examination of displacement and diaspora, identity and belonging, love and desire… It’s all packed in here and executed beautifully.

People Collide by Isle McElroy
This novel is divine. It’s about a married couple who wake up in each other’s bodies. It’s isn’t interested in the why or the how of the supernatural element, it’s about the what now. We follow the husband, living in his wife’s body, as he adjusts to this new reality and figures out what embodying his wife teaches him about himself and their relationship.

Valencia by Michelle Tea
This is a diaristic autofiction novel that takes us through the reality of the sapphic underbelly of the party scene in San Francisco in the early 90s. Drugs, dating, mess, sex, sex, and more sex. This was written as Michelle Tea was in the heat of all these things. It’s not about investigating them, it’s about documenting her world for posterity.

She Who Remains by Rene Karabash (tr. by Izidora Angel)
The novel is framed as a journalist interviewing someone walking us through memory, relationships, and family. It’s mostly about their early life in a remote part of the Albanian mountains, which was ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun. The cultural practice it focuses on is the sworn virgin, through which the interview subject renounced womanhood and took a vow of celibacy to assume the identity of a man.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yang Shuang-zi (tr. by Lin King)
This is set in Taiwan in the 1930s, and it’s the story of a celebrated Japanese author who travels to Taiwan to write about food and culture. Her and her interpreter develop a strong bond and a deep relationship through this experience.
The conceit of the book itself is that it is a piece of lost literature being translated again—sort of a Russian nesting doll of translation with a book within a book, footnotes from the fictional and actual translator. It is brilliant.

Fruit Fly by Josh Silver
This is a thriller about a washed up writer who can’t find her voice so she takes someone else’s. It’s been 10 years since her big hit debut and she has writer’s block, but when she meets a gay junkie the words he inspires start pouring out of her.
The story twists and turns, it’s dark and gritty, not at all sanitized… it goes there.

Hello, Limerence by Momo Yamaguchi
This is about Mika, a 25 year old virgin working a boring office job in Tokyo. She enjoys thinking about boys, fantasizing about violent email replies, talking shit with/about her friends, and having crushes.
She dates, she fucks, she gets ghosted, she dates, she ghosts, she plans her imaginary future wedding, she loses friends… It comes at you at breakneck speed, but it’s all done so well.

Having Spent Life Seeking by Kae Temptest
A narrator is returning to the place they grew up in after more than a decade in prison. At first, this feels like the book’s why, but very quickly the why turns into the who of the story. The world of this novel is steeped in complicated family dynamics, a low income life in an English seaside town, and so much queerness. It explores gender, desire, sex, sexuality, masculinity, and because we get to see the past as well as the present, those things are a kaleidoscope of threads being pulled at in all kinds of directions.

L’homme qui danse by Victor Jestin (Dancefloor in English)
The premise of this novel is quite simple: we explore one man’s life exclusively as it relates to one specific nightclub he likes to dance at. It’s set in suburban France, and spans a few decades starting in the 90s. Arthur is the kind of man most will feel sorry for, or find odd, or not really connect with. When he goes out, it’s to dance. That’s the only way he knows how to connect to others and to his own person.

Kingfisher by Rozie Kelly
This novel’s narrator is a writer in a gay relationship, but he starts to develop feelings for an older woman who happens to be a poet. The relationship between the writer and the poet takes over the story in the most intimate and beautiful way.
Kingfisher is an incredible story about artists, and blurring the lines of love, respect and admiration.

A Visitation of Spirits by Randall Kenan
This is the story of Horace, a sixteen year old boy in the American South in the 80s tormented by his own homosexuality, as he is having a crisis of faith and identity. His life and family have deep roots in the church and faith cannot be untangled from his existence. Guilt and fear and anguish are making him slip into hallucination and lose his grip on life.

Girl’s Girl by Sonia Feldman
This is a novel about friendship and love and desire, and the times when one bleeds into the next. We follow Mina as she is looking back on the summer her life shifted into the next gear. She is fifteen and on the brink of stepping into the next phase of personhood: into queerness, into the world that exists outside of her cozy bedroom walls. Mina isn’t scared of the road ahead, she just doesn’t have the map to show her the way.

La chaleur by Victor Jestin (Heatwave in English)
This is a dark coming of age that follows a seventeen year old boy as his family’s camping holiday in the south of France is coming to a close. On the night before their last day, he watches another boy die, choked by the chains of a swing set. We follow him in his final moments there as he is reeling from what he has witnessed, riddled with guilt, and in the throes of late teenage-hood.

Orange by Curtis Garner
This book is about two boys in two different timelines. The first is 2018, in Cornwall, as they get to know each other over a summer and develop an intimate relationship. The kind of bond that wrecks the chances of all future partners. The second is 2023, in London, as they reconnect over a weekend. What does this time difference mean for them as individuals, and what does it mean for them as a unit?

My Great-Grandfather Danced Ballet by Misha Solomon
This is a narrative poetry collection that investigates queerness past. The central conversation in this collection is between the poet and himself. There’s a modern day gay person in Montreal reckoning with identity, love, sex, belonging, and then this fictionalized account of a queer ancestor. It feels like someone taking stock of who they are and wondering how that all came to be.

Fat Swim by Emma Copley Eisenberg
This is a collection of interconnected stories from people in the margins, or people who feel that way: A beauty vlogger, a trans librarian, a pronoun-obsessed boomer… they are all shown in ways to make the reader think about what being alive even means. Gender, sexuality and the body are all put on trial with extreme precision.
My favourite stories are Ray’s Happy Birthday Bar, Lanternfly, Camp Sensation, but the one that stands out most for me is the title story, Fat Swim.

Dark Rides by Derek McCormack
This is a novel made up of vignettes that are all snappy bits of the life as a young gay guy trying to survive in rural Ontario in the 1950s. Clandestine hookups, farmhand life, conversion therapy, it’s all packed into these sparkling moments. Canadiana, faggotry and a time-capsule, what’s not to love?

The Wonderful World That Almost Was by Andrew Durbin
This recounts decades in the lives of two queer American artists, Paul Thek and Peter Hujar. We follow them from the 1950s all the way to the 1970s, with pitstops through their childhoods and their deaths to AIDS. Their story is told together because they are enmeshed in one another. At times peers or friends, other times lovers or enemies, we see every step of their shared existence through these important decades.

My hoard of queer book recommendations is already huge, but I am always looking for more. You know me, a hint of gay and it goes right to the top of the TBR.