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Maybe it’s my self-selecting peer network of fellow authors, or maybe there really are more and more amazing queer books coming out every year. Either way, 2024 is full of LGBTQ+ titles. Despite the far right’s continued push for book bans and the weird ways some organizations are preemptively bowing to the pressure, queer writers are continuing to make incredible art. If this were one of those in/out lists everyone writes around New Year’s time, I’d say: Queer books are hella in, and the bigots who try to pull them off shelves are seriously out.
And I mean it when I say there is a plethora of books by LGBTQ+ authors to be excited about in 2024. The personal spreadsheet I use to keep track of new releases already has over 50 such books on it, and it’s limited to the genres I usually write about, so that’s a major undercount. There’s something new coming down the pipeline for every vibe, interest, and need: Want to travel the world vicariously and learn a ton while doing it? Check out Shayla Lawsone’s How to Live Free in a Dangerous World. In the mood for a queer retelling of Greek mythology? Get your hands on Icarus by K. Ancrum. Feeling enraged by the continued assaults on trans rights? You’re going to want to read legendary theorist Judith Butler’s newest tome.
Below, you’ll find a selection of queer books we here at Them are most looking forward to in 2024, for your pre-ordering and/or adding-to-your-TBR-shelf pleasure.
City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter — January 16
I love multigenerational novels and witnessing the way a family’s secrets, joys, and traumas can move through the ages, which is why I’m super stoked for Temim Fruchter’s novel City of Laughter. Set in the titular city of Ropshitz, Poland during the 18th century, a badchan — a jester tasked with making wedding guests laugh — is visited by an ageless being. The same being starts showing up in the lives of present-day Shiva and her mother Hannah, who can trace their ancestry to Ropshitz. Shiva's newfound interest in Jewish folklore leads her to Poland, where she hopes to learn more about her family’s mysterious past.
How to Live Free in a Dangerous World: A Decolonial Memoir by Shayla Lawson — February 6
Traveling around the world? A focus on healing individually and communally? And it’s all told from the point of view of a queer Black disabled person who is also an incredible poet and wordsmith? Please sign me right up! Shayla Lawson’s new essay collection finds the author encountering lost loves and new friends in Egypt, Bermuda, Mexico City, Zimbabwe, and more. In each place they visit, they learn to let go of something that’s been holding them back, while also developing philosophies of freedom and healing. Inspirational, but never twee, this memoir belongs on your TBR.
Ways and Means by Daniel Lefferts — February 6
Alistair McCabe, a gay Rust Belt transplant to NYC, is like so many of us: working for someone shady in order to get out of student debt. But the secrets his billionaire employer is hiding end up being dangerous enough that Alistair himself has to go on the run. His lovers, Mark and Elijah, are struggling with their own jobs and attendant moral compromises. Taking place in the shadow of the 2016 political upheaval and the disillusionment that follows, Daniel Lefferts’ debut novel puts quintessential millennial striving under the microscope to glorious effect, and as a millennial former NYC transplant myself, I’m so ready for it.
These Letters End in Tears by Musih Tedji Xaviere — March 12
When Bessem first spots Fatima on the soccer field, she’s impressed with the other woman’s comfort playing among the men. When Fatima winks at her, Bessem begins to fall — hard. The trouble is that same-sex relationships are illegal in Cameroon, and getting caught could lead to prison time. Years after the women’s doomed affair, Bessem, still closeted, hasn’t forgotten about her disappeared former lover Fatima. When she spots a mutual friend from their past, Bessem decides it’s time to find her beloved. A star-crossed lesbian love story with very real stakes, this book is going to make me ugly-cry (complimentary).
Love the World or Get Killed Trying by Alvina Chamberland — March 15
In this Swedish author’s English-language debut work of autofiction, a trans woman named Alvina is about to turn 30. Contemplating a variety of existential concerns — sexuality, longing, death, et cetera — she travels around Europe, from Iceland to Berlin and Paris, trying to figure out how to keep herself from becoming bitter and hard. Exhausted at being the target of straight men’s disgust on the one hand and deep lust on the other, Alvina’s stream-of-consciousness narration is sharp, cathartic, and so worth reading.
Who’s Afraid of Gender? by Judith Butler — March 19
Judith Butler, perhaps one of the best-known queer scholars of our time, has been thinking about gender again. Instead of a new theory surrounding gender, though, what they present in their newest book is the way that gender — and especially expansive gender expression — has become a bogeyman for the right wing, authoritarian regimes, and fascist movements. Gender and its reality beyond the binary are being used to sow fear, a useful and distracting move when real concerns like oppression, poverty, and war are pressing. It’s always exciting to see what the Gender Trouble scribe has been thinking about, and their newest work promises to be equally relevant.
Long Live Queer Nightlife: How the Closing of Gay Bars Sparked A Revolution by Amin Ghaziani — March 19
Documenting secret parties, club nights, and the underground scene in general, sociology professor Amin Ghaziani traces the revolutionary spirit in nightlife spaces where queer, trans, and racial minorities reclaim their joy. Using his own experience and dozens of interviews with people in the scene, Ghaziani showcases the vitality of queer people thriving outside the established norms of the largely white cis monosexual gay bars, offering a refreshingly hopeful perspective on the changing nature of queer urban nightlife.
Icarus by K. Ancrum — March 26
In this YA romance from K. Ancrum, some classic Greek lore gets a queer twist. Icarus’s father is an art restorer — and an art forger. Icarus is his assistant, stealing expensive works of art and replacing them with his dad’s forgeries, which doesn’t leave him much time for high school socializing. Besides, he knows he can’t get close to anyone lest they learn his father’s secrets. One night, during a heist targeting his dad’s greatest enemy, Icarus runs into Helios, the enemy’s son. As the two teenage boys form a forbidden friendship, they begin to plot their escapes from their overbearing dads. A romantic and mystery-filled new take on the Icarus myth, Ancrum’s newest is one to watch for.
Like Happiness by Ursula Villarreal-Moura — March 26
In 2015, Tatum Vega's life is finally on track. She's living with her partner in Chile and working at an art museum. But her past is dredged up when a reporter calls: M. Domínguez, an author Tatum assisted and orbited for years, has been accused of assault and the reporter wants Tatum's perspective on the matters. This forces her to reevaluate and confront the years of her and M.’s odd, undefinable, but obsessive relationship. There’s not much I love more than a protagonist needing to reckon with their past, especially when it means trying to understand it from an older, healthier perspective, and that’s exactly what Ursula Villareal-Moura’s novel promises to offer.
Cactus Country: A Boyhood Memoir by Zoë Bossiere — May 14
As a nonbinary person whose peers kept mistaking for a boy when I was a child, I am seriously eager to dig into Zoë Bossiere’s memoir. In Catcus Country, the author explores, among other things, how they experienced life as a trans boy — even if they didn’t have the language to label that identity back then — once they moved to Cactus Country RV Park in Tuscon, Arizona at age 11. The book explores genderfluidity, masculinity, and the American Southwest, following Bossiere as they navigate their changing body, the working-class men they came to love and the harms those men perpetuated, and much more.
Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg — May 28
As a longstanding fan of Emma Copley Eisenberg’s work, I cannot wait for her debut novel. Protagonists Leah and Bernie are new housemates in Philadelphia, and soon develop a far deeper relationship than either of them expected. Leah is a writer, Bernie a photographer, and while their forms of media are different, they share a desire to document the world around them, in all its complex brokenness, with empathy and love. When they set off on a road trip to claim an iffy inheritance left for Bernie, the pair learn about the kind of humans, artists, and lovers they might become.
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