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Many queer books talk about queer struggles: about hostility and discrimination, about estrangement from or grudging acceptance by friends and family. And these stories are absolutely important. But we also need hope and joy: we need models for queer family and community in the books we read. Over the last year, I found myself making a list of books I’ve loved that have queer main characters who get happy endings, and sharing it with friends who ask.
While they’re still less visible than straight characters, there is no more a dearth of queer characters in fiction (at least in western fiction). This list has dozens of good queer books published last year alone. The book recommendations that follow are therefore in no way exhaustive. What I am doing is sharing with you books I’ve loved and that meet my very arbitrary criteria of “fun” (which is why it skews heavy on novels – I don’t read enough short story or poetry collections/anthologies to include them and it’s harder to judge these on “happy endings”).
The world feels bleak; have a little escape with one of these books. I won’t promise no tragedy or dystopia, but if there is, it’s balanced by heavy doses of humour and triumph.
Picture books for children and teenagers
Find more recommendations on children’s books on gender and sexuality here, but here are some favourites from me, a person in their forties.
Julián Is A Mermaid and Julián At The Wedding are two children’s picture books by Jessica Love that show a child experimenting with gender expression and finding joy. They are also guides for adults on encouraging children and providing a loving, accepting space for them.
There isn’t much plot in the Tea Dragon Society by Kay O’Neill: people and magical creatures (including children) make friends while tending little dragons that act like pets. It was originally a web comic, if you prefer reading online.
On A Sunbeam by Tillie Walden also started as a web comic, and has space exploration, found family and epic love. Two girls who fall in love at a boarding school and are later separated, only for our heroine to cross galaxies in search of her beloved.
The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen uses classic fairy tales (Cinderella and The Little Mermaid – Andersen, not Disney) to tell a complex story of immigration, parental love, and coming out.
Graphic novels for grown-ups
You can read Finding Home, Hari Conner’s graphic fantasy novel for free online or buy the PDFs on the author’s site. The plot is simple: a dryad and a young cook go on a road trip. The themes are not: there’s abuse and discrimination and panic attacks and rejection by family. But it’s full of hope and healing (in more ways than one) and gorgeous illustrations.
The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel (yes, the Bechdel of the Bechdel-Wallace test) is a compilation of comics Bechdel created from the 1980s to the 2000s. The book reads like a graphic novel, following a group of friends as they grow older and fall in and out of love. One of my favourite books to reread.
Chapter books for older children and teenagers
All of the books in this section are set at least partly in schools. The House On The Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune is an absurdist, magical tale about a bureaucrat who goes to a little island and finds a ready-made family of misfits. This is one of those fantasy worlds where being queer is considered unremarkable (even though there’s plenty of other kinds of biases): the two adult men fall in love and it’s never questioned or treated with surprise.
The Murder Most Unladylike series by Robin Stevens provides an interesting subversion of the schoolgirl mystery/adventure genre (think Enid Blyton, but even Agatha Christie played with this in Cat Among the Pigeons). Our narrator Hazel Wong is a rich Chinese girl in the 1930s who is shipped off to boarding school in England and finds herself out of place and homesick. (My fondness for nerdy outsiders as protagonists will not be a surprise to anyone who’s read my book). She strikes up an intense friendship with her classmate – upper class, intelligent, suave Daisy Wells – and they investigate mysteries together, one in every book. But it’s not until the seventh murder mystery, Death in the Spotlight, that we learn for sure that Daisy (who is not a sidekick but co-protagonist and indeed names herself President of the Detective Society) is queer.
Slightly Burnt by Payal Dhar is the only book on this list that doesn’t have a queer protagonist but is instead the teenage protagonist’s discovery that her best friend is gay and her journey of learning to accept this after an initial shock. It’s beautifully written and, despite the presence of homophobia, is warm and unflinching in its support of queer lives. Gift this to the young person in your life.
Crime, suspense and thrillers
Queer detectives are an interesting sub-genre, inserting queer heroes into a genre that traditionally treats them as victims (killing them off early) or villains (positing that being queer makes you evil –The Silence Of The Lambs is the most notorious example of this).
The first grown-up queer detective I came across in a book was Henry Rios, a gay defense attorney in California. Michael Nava started writing these in the 1980s, and rewrote some of them more recently: the first one was re-released as Lay Your Sleeping Head in 2016 and is a good place to start. These books are not easy: apart from murder, they contain familial abuse, police violence, homophobia and discrimination, and, in one book, paedophilia (maybe skip the third book). But it’s a portrait of the gay community over the decades, through the affectionate gaze of a member of the community (who also solves murders).
Lev AC Rosen’s Evander Mills is also a gay detective in California, but Lavender House is set in the 1950s and came out a few years ago. Mills is fired from the police for being gay, and is feeling suicidal when he is given a new purpose by a middle-aged lesbian who wants him to solve the murder of her wife. While it uses period details to bleak effect, it also showcases love, friendship and beauty, and the writing is often humorous – I found it lighter, emotionally, than Nava’s books.
Val McDermid’s Lindsey Gordon books has a socialist lesbian reporter solving murders in the UK. The first, Report For Murder, takes place in a British boarding school and was published as far back as 1987.
Murder In The Spires by KJ Charles is also an educational campus murder, this one in Oxford in the early 1900s. A group of friends fall apart because they’re all suspects. After years of living under the shadow of the crime, our hero and narrator Jem decides to investigate and clear his name, and along the way falls in love with his unethical but passionate old friend.
The marketing copy for Hither, Page by Cat Sebastian says, “Agatha Christie but make it gay!!” The book delivers on this promise. It was most evocative of Moving Finger, to me – a war veteran moves into a quiet English village that turns out to be the nest of a murderer, falls in love and is helped by old ladies who are sharper than they appear.
In my book, Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd, a group of queer women – our nerdy heroine, Nilima; the boss she is falling for, Shwetha; and the police inspector who’s also Nilima’s ex-girlfriend’s current partner – team up to solve a murder. It’s got India’s first lesbian detective, it’s got friendships being forged over common goals and values, it has a love story. As well as books and bookstores, all in scenic Bengaluru.
Memoirs
It feels unfair to judge memoirs on whether or not they are “fun”. But I read Leaving Isn’t the Hardest Thing by Lauren Hough, Ten Steps To Nanette by Hannah Gadsby, Strong Female Character by Fern Brady, Homeless: Growing Up Lesbian And Dyslexic In India by K Vaishali, and Something That May Shock And Discredit You by Daniel Lavery in the last year, and they’re all occasionally funny and often charming, even though each of them deals with some difficult topics.
Science fiction and fantasy
Arguably the most diverse genre: there are many, many queer SFF books to choose from. I love swashbuckling YA fantasy that evoke a vaguely historical setting, such as the Gardener’s Hand trilogy by Felicia Davin (the first book is titled Thornfruit) that has an intriguing mix of politics and polyamory, and the Mask Of Shadows two-book series by Linsey Miller – which, like Thornfruit, features a protagonist who’s initially a thief, but Mask’s Sal makes a dramatic transition to assassin. And there’s Monstrous Regiment, Terry Pratchett’s queerest book.
Let’s jump over to sci-fi (and thanks to my queer book club for most of these recommendations). All Systems Red is the first book in the Murderbot Diaries by Martha Wells. Murderbot is a nickname the “Security Unit” gives itself; and the plot is basic – it rescues a bunch of humans who are targeted by other, more evil humans on a mostly-uninhabited planet. What isn’t basic is the misanthropic, utterly adorable robot-hero who is (by its own admission) genderless and sexless. I don’t know if I ever liked a protagonist more, though Murderbot itself would definitely be uncomfortable with my affection.
Iron Widow by Xiran Jay Zhao is like a more gender-aware Hunger Games (or a more generally aware Ender’s Game). The protagonist, Zetian, volunteers for a deadly job for the chance to avenge her murdered sister. This is a dystopian world, marked with extreme violence, including colonisation and gender discrimination, and our heroes themselves are ruthless (though more sinned against than sinning). Still, if you can stomach torture and death and outright war, this novel has exhilarating moments with Zetian’s discovery of her own strength, and some tender love too. I generally have a low tolerance for gore and suffering, but this book is categorised as YA, and therefore those aspects are somewhat sanitised, which made for a breezy read. The ending is a cliffhanger, and book two is newly out.
Too fast and furious for you? Try Meru by Indian-American engineer-writer SB Divya. Jaya, a young woman with chronic illness, and Vaha, a young gigantic flying being, team up on an interplanetary quest that the latter’s best friend is out to sabotage. All Jaya wants is to love Vaha, become a mother and do science in space.
Period fiction
I wish I’d found Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show decades ago, given that it was first published in 1936 (and is set in the 1840s). A scorned aristocrat goes to Paris in search of her husband and falls in love with his mistress, while revolution rages in the background. Outrageous and outrageously beautiful.
I think of Sarah Waters as the author of (very good!) sad lesbians books, but her first novel, Tipping The Velvet, is a glorious coming-of-age tale that includes cross-dressing/trans expression, stage performances, very horny and occasionally kinky sex, and a season of deep depression before our probably non-binary hero finds community and activism and love, all in Victorian England. (The title itself is explained as a Victorian term for cunnilingus.)
Contemporary literary fiction
All This Could be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews is an explosive addition to Indian (well, Indian-American) queer fiction. A coming-of-age tale featuring Sneha, who starts off apathetic and depressed in a small town and a difficult job, and slowly builds confidence and community, this book offers the hope we all need, and in stunning prose. There’ll be heartbreak, it seems to be telling us, but your friends will save you. If you read one book in this list, make it this one.
Mahmud and Ayaz by R Raj Rao is a fun romp or an audacious fable: what it is not is a cautionary tale. Despite all odds, despite the increasingly reckless antics of our titular heroes (Mahmud consciously models himself on Mahmud of Ghazni, a ruthless ruler and lover of Ayaz, who was enslaved), we get love – even if it’s not forever.
In Detransition, Baby, Torey Peters explores transness and womanhood through the lives of three characters: Reese, a trans woman who longs to be a mother; her ex-partner Ames/Amy who detransitions back to being a man because transition made life too hard; and Katrina, his cis biracial partner and boss. It’s an intimate, unflinching portrayal of trans lives.
In Fierce Femmes And Notorious Liars by Kai Cheng Thom, a trans girl runs away from home and finds a community of people who accept her. It’s not paradise; it’s a place with very real problems, with dangers that lurk without and erupt into violence. The story is written as a fable, with doses of magical realism. As our heroine writes to her sister: “Because maybe what really matters isn’t whether something is true or false, maybe what matters is the story itself: what kinds of doors it opens, what kind of dreams it brings.”
Unmana is a writer based in Mumbai. Their debut novel Chikkamma Tours (Pvt.) Ltd was published in 2024. It is a queer bibliomystery.
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