The Ultimate LGBTQ+ Pride Book List

The conversation about masculinity, patriarchy, and misogyny has never been so prominent or heated. Alarmed by a new generation of angry, broken young men, genderqueer writer Jacob Tobia sets out to explore what’s going on and comes to a shocking conclusion: Emotionally and spiritually speaking, men and boys may be the ones suffering the most under the gender binary right now. From exploring the abuse endured by men in the name of gender norms to addressing the myriad failures of feminist discourse in grappling with men’s suffering, this book calls everyone — men, women, and nonbinary people alike — back to the table.

What makes a family? How is it defined and by whom? Is freedom for everyone? In Necessary Fiction, Eloghosa Osunde poses these provocative questions and many more while exploring the paths and dreams, hopes and fears of more than two dozen characters who are staking out lives for themselves in contemporary Nigeria. As they work to establish themselves in the city’s lively worlds of art, music, entertainment, and creative commerce, we meet their collective and individual attempts to reckon with the necessary fiction they carry for survival.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Mostly Dead Things, a sparkling and funny new novel of entertainment, ambition, art, and love. Equal parts bravado, tenderness, and humor, and bursting with misfits, magicians, musicians, and mimes, Stop Me If You’ve Heard This One is a masterpiece of comedic fiction that asks big questions about art and performance, friendship and community, and the importance of timing in jokes and in life.

Ocean Vuong returns with a bighearted novel about chosen family, unexpected friendship, and the stories we tell ourselves in order to survive. At its heart is a brave epic about what it means to exist on the fringes of society and to reckon with the wounds that haunt our collective soul. Hallmarks of Ocean Vuong’s writing are on full display in this story of loss, hope, and how far we would go to possess one of life’s most fleeting mercies: A second chance.

From the author of Oprah’s Book Club pick and New York Times bestseller Nightcrawling, here is an astonishing new novel about the joys and entanglements of a fierce group of teenage mothers in a small town on the Florida panhandle.

Set in a remote village in the north of England, Open, Heaven unfolds over the course of one year in which two teenage boys meet and transform each other’s lives. Open, Heaven is a novel about desire, yearning, and the terror of first love. With the striking economy and lyricism that animate his work as a poet, Seán Hewitt has written a mesmerizing hymn to boyhood, sensuality, and love in all its forms. A truly exceptional debut.

Enka meets Mathilde in art school and is instantly drawn to her, desperate to keep her close. Enter SCAFFOLD. This cutting-edge technology could allow Enka to inhabit Mathilde’s mind and access her memories, artistic inspirations, and deep-seated trauma. Undergoing this procedure would link them forever. But at what cost? Blisteringly smart, thought-provoking, and shocking, Immaculate Conception offers us a portrait of close friendship — achingly tender and twisted — that captures the tenuous line between love and possession that will haunt you long after you turn the final page.

A big-hearted novel of nostalgia and longing, and a poignant exploration of how we choose to love. A novel that speaks to unfulfilled desires and the euphoric nostalgia that’s particular to the beginning of middle age, The Other Wife is as heartfelt as it is daring in its deep reckoning with the past and quest for true joy.

From the acclaimed author of Chef’s Kiss, a groundbreaking trans Regency romance that’s both delightfully witty and refreshingly iconoclastic. With its heady combination of dry wit, slow-burn romance, and a nuanced portrait of trans identity, A Gentleman’s Gentleman stands to transform the historical romance genre as we know it.

A page-turning, irresistible novel of class, ambition, and love, this is the breathtaking story of a woman risking everything for a second chance at the one who got away. A sweeping romance, Ordinary Love is the beautiful, wrenching, completely seductive story of two people trying to forge a path toward hope, bound by a love they discovered when they were too young to understand its power.

A newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants, guided by the voices of artists, poets, and kings, embarks on a remarkable search for a family secret that leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum. Electrifying, funny, and wholly original, Martyr! heralds the arrival of an essential new voice in contemporary fiction.

A vibrant, queer, Jewish debut “teeming with heart, angst, love, and self discovery” (Emily Austin) about a young woman who, caught between the expectations of others and her own evolving desires, is forced to make a series of fraught, life-altering decisions. An achingly tender and resonant story of survival, first love, and growing up queer in the ‘90s, Girls Girls Girls is a piercing exploration of the choices we make in the thrilling and often confounding search for ourselves and home.

A rich and sweeping photographic history of the Queer Liberation Movement, from the creators and curators of the massively popular Instagram account @lgbt_history, released in time for the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall Riots.

James Baldwin’s groundbreaking novel about love and the fear of love, set among the bohemian bars and nightclubs of 1950s Paris. With sharp probing insight, Giovanni’s Room tells an impassioned, deeply moving story that lays bare the unspoken complexities of the human heart.

Poet and journalist Shayla Lawson follows their National Book Critics Circle finalist This Is Major with these daring and exquisitely crafted essays, where Lawson journeys across the globe, finds beauty in tumultuous times, and powerfully disrupts the constraints of race, gender, and disability.

Ten days after calling off her wedding, CJ Hauser went on an expedition to Texas to study the whooping crane. After a week wading through the gulf, she realized she’d almost signed up to live someone else’s life. Told with the late-night barstool directness of your wisest, most bighearted friend, The Crane Wife is a book for everyone whose life doesn’t look the way they thought it would; for everyone learning to find joy in the not-knowing; for everyone trying, if sometimes failing, to build a new sort of life story, a new sort of family, a new sort of home, to live in.

Comedian Rob Anderson examines queer stereotypes and LGBTQ+ culture with humorous explanations borrowed from real principles across multiple fields of science.

At once razor-sharp, profoundly brave, and often very, very funny, the essays in Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing interrogate our notions of ecstasy, queerness, and what it means to live freely. Each piece is a reckoning: Of survival, identity, and how to reclaim one’s past when carving out a future.

Informative, heartbreaking, and profoundly empowering, Tomorrow Will Be Different is Sarah McBride’s story of love and loss and a powerful entry point into the LGBTQ community’s battle for equal rights and what it means to be openly transgender. McBride weaves the important political and cultural milestones into a personal journey that will open hearts and change minds.

A staggering, tender epic about gay men in rural China and the women who marry them. Spanning three timelines — post-socialist China, 1980s Chinatown, and contemporary New York — Cinema Love is an “exceptional” and “moving” (Alice Hoffman) epic about men and women who find themselves in forbidden relationships; the weight of secrets; and the way memory forever haunts the present.

June 28, 2019 marked the fiftieth anniversary of the Stonewall uprising, which is considered the most significant event in the gay liberation movement, and the catalyst for the modern fight for LGBTQ rights in the United States. Drawing from the New York Public Library’s archives, The Stonewall Reader is a collection of first accounts, diaries, periodic literature, and articles from LGBTQ magazines and newspapers that documented both the years leading up to and the years following the riots.

A “hilarious, tender, raw, and heart-stoppingly moving” (Amanda Eyre Ward) debut about a down-on-his-luck gay man working out how he fits into the world, making up for lost time, and opening himself up to life’s possibilities.

A coming-of-age comedy. A telenovela-worthy drama. A moving family saga. All in a phone call you won’t want to hang up on.

An essential and revelatory coming-of-age narrative from a thrilling new voice, Rainbow Milk follows nineteen-year-old Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of his Jehovah’s Witness upbringing.

Two warriors shepherd an ancient god across a broken land to end the tyrannical reign of a royal family in this new epic fantasy from the author of The Vanished Birds. Both a sweeping adventure story and an intimate exploration of identity, legacy, and belonging, The Spear Cuts Through Water is an ambitious and profound saga that will transport and transform you — and is like nothing you’ve ever read before.

This coming-of-age queer love story is a sharply observed and intimate story of grief and healing, doubt and self-acceptance, set in the glamorous but grueling world of international modeling. Body Grammar shines with the anxieties of finding your place in the world and the heartbreaking beauty of pursuing love.

By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

A photographic celebration of the love and relationships of queer people of color. This singular, moving collection offers an intimate look at what it means to live at the intersections of queer and POC identities today, and honors an inclusive vision of love, affection, and family across the spectrum of gender, race, and age.

Set in contemporary suburban Japan, Our Colors is the story of Sora Itoda, a sixteen-year-old aspiring painter who experiences his world in synesthetic hues of blues and reds and is governed by the emotional turbulence of being a teenager. Our Colors is a mesmerizing coming-of-age and coming-out graphic novel by the genius writer-artist of the Eisner Award-winning breakout hit My Brother’s Husband.

A burned-out bisexual confronts old demons, her estranged chosen family, and the ex she maybe shouldn’t have walked away from when she attends her five-year college reunion.

Levy chronicles the adventure and heartbreak of being, in her own words, “a woman who is free to do whatever she chooses.” Her story of resilience becomes an unforgettable portrait of the shifting forces in our culture, of what has changed — and of what is eternal.

Tripping Arcadia is a page-turning and shocking tale with an unforgettable protagonist that explores family legacy and inheritance, the sacrifices we must make to get by in today’s world, and the intoxicating, dangerous power of wealth.

From the beloved author of The Old Place comes a tender, funny, and fresh novel about a gay writer in New York City whose life is irrevocably altered, and then again thirty years later.

From the singular voices behind Tom and Lorenzo comes the ultimate guide to all-things RuPaul’s Drag Race and its influence on modern LGBTQ culture. Legendary Children centers itself around the idea that not only is RuPaul’s Drag Race the queerest show in the history of television, but that RuPaul and company devised a show that serves as an actual museum of queer cultural and social history, drawing on queer traditions and the work of legendary figures going back nearly a century.

America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like seventeen-year-old Lily Hu. With deportation looming over her father, Lily will risk everything to let her love see the light of day.

Winner of the 2015 Man Booker Prize, Marlon James combines masterful storytelling with his unrivaled skill at characterization and his meticulous eye for detail to forge a novel of dazzling ambition and scope.

A novel by a brilliant new voice, Hombrecito is a queer coming-of-age story about a young immigrant’s complex relationships with his mother and his motherland.

A searing novel centering around a gay-to-straight conversion camp in Mississippi and a man’s reckoning with the trauma he faced there as a teen.

A vital and inspiring work of reportage, Finding Latinx calls on all of us to expand our understanding of what it means to be Latino and what it means to be American. The first step towards change, writes Ramos, is for us to recognize who we are.

A classic runaway-train narrative, full of exquisite escalations, edge-of-your-seat thrills, and oh-my-god twists. P. J. Vernon’s Bath Haus is a scintillating thriller with an emotional punch, perfect for readers curious for their next must-read novel.

From a brilliant new voice comes an electrifying novel of a young immigrant building a life for herself — a warm, dazzling, and profound saga of queer love, friendship, work, and precarity in twenty-first century America.