Our Best LGBTQ+ Books for Pride Month

Real Life by Brandon Taylor

The Booker shortlisted novel is a deeply affecting story about the emotional cost of reckoning with desire, and overcoming pain.

The Opposite of a Person by Lieke Marsman, tr by Sophie Collins

Startlingly unique, timely and ultimately deeply moving, The Opposite of a Person is a dazzling, cerebral tour-de-force, a poignant love story and an urgent, unforgettable call to arms. 

The Breaks by Julietta Singh

The Breaks is at once both a celebration of queer family-making, communal living and Brown girlhood and a profound meditation on race, inheritance and queer mothering at the end of the world.

Please Miss by Grace Lavery

A memoir of gender transition and recovery from addiction, a dance across genres, a ripping-up of the rulebook, Please Miss is unlike anything you’ve ever read before.

Valentino by Natalia Ginzburg, tr by Avril Bardoni

In Valentino, class, social expectations, wealth and marriage come under Natalia Ginzburg’s forensic scrutiny, her unflinching moral realism and her keen psychological insight resulting in a work of quiet devastation.

Cassandra at the Wedding by Dorothy Barker

A classic of twentieth-century American literature, Cassandra at the Wedding is a stylish, witty and insightful novel about love, loyalty and coming to terms with the only life you have.

Some Strange Music Draws Me In by Griffin Hansbury

A beautiful, compassionate and evocative coming-of-age story, a tale of transawakening, and a love letter to friendships and art for their power to transform and enrich a life.

An Compass Error by Sybille Bedford

As the Second World War looms, Flavia is living in a small village in the South of France. She studies for her Oxford entrance, swims in the sea, eats at local cafés, and lives with all the confidence and relish of youth.

Filthy Animals by Brandon Taylor

What connects these stories is the tension between the surface of things and the intensity of our inner worlds. With exquisite empathy, Brandon Taylor shows that though violence hovers at the edge of many encounters, so too does tenderness and love.