 DonateCheck out this list of NEW LGBTQIA+ FICTION!
The Ballad of Jacquotte Delahaye by Briony Cameron
In the tumultuous town of Yáquimo, Santo Domingo, Jacquotte Delahaye is an unknown but up-and-coming shipwright. Her dreams are bold but her ambitions are bound by the confines of her life with her self-seeking French father. When her way of life and the delicate balance of power in the town are threatened, she is forced to flee her home and become a woman on the run along with a motley crew of refugees, including a mysterious young woman named Teresa. Jacquotte and her band become indentured servants to the infamous Blackhand, a ruthless pirate captain who rules his ship with an iron fist. As they struggle to survive his brutality, Jacquotte finds herself unable to resist Teresa despite their differences. When Blackhand hatches a dangerous scheme to steal a Portuguese shipment of jewels, Jacquotte must rely on her wits, resourcefulness, and friends to survive. But she discovers there is a grander, darker scheme of treachery at play, and she ultimately must decide what price she is willing to pay to secure a better future for them all.
Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg
Bernie is a talented young photographer who has quit taking photographs in favor of drinking and drifting around Philadelphia. Leah is ambitious yet flailing grad student and journalist who must know the answer to every question. When Bernie replies to Leah’s ad for a new housemate, they tentatively begin the kind of uncategorizable, queer relationship that can only flourish between two people who deeply understand each others’ dreams and dissatisfactions. When Bernie’s college professor dies in rural Pennsylvania and leaves her a complicated inheritance, Leah volunteers to accompany Bernie, turning the jaunt into a road trip with an ambitious mission: to document 2018 America in words and photographs. What ensues is a three-week journey through the state of Pennsylvania in which Bernie and Leah have eye-opening conversations with a wide-range of Americans, and develop a piercing intimacy that cracks each of them wide open. Ultimately, they create a joint work of genre-defying art that leaves them-and our nation-forever changed.
Coexistence: Stories by Billy-Ray Belcourt
A collection of intersecting stories about Indigenous love and loneliness from a Giller-longlisted author and one of contemporary literature’s most boundless minds. Across the prairies and Canada’s west coast, on reservations and university campuses, at literary festivals and existential crossroads, the characters in Coexistence are searching for connection. They’re learning to live with and understand one another, to see beauty and terror side by side, and to accept that the past, present, and future can inhabit a single moment. An aging mother confides in her son about an intimate friendship from her distant girlhood. A middling poet is haunted by the cliché his life has become. A chorus of anonymous gay men dispense unvarnished truths about their sex lives. A man freshly released from prison finds that life on the outside has sinister strictures of its own. A PhD student dog-sits for his parents at what was once a lodging for nuns operating a residential school–a house where the spectre of Catholicism comes to feel eerily literal. Bearing the compression, crystalline sentences, and emotional potency that have characterized his earlier books, Coexistence is a testament to Belcourt’s mastery of and playfulness in any literary form. A vital addition to an already rich catalogue, this is a must-read collection and the work of an author at the height of his powers.
Spitting Gold by Carmella Lowkis
Paris, 1866: When Baroness Sylvie Devereux receives a house call from Charlotte Mothe, the sister she disowned, she fears her shady past as a spirit medium has caught up with her. But with their father ill and Charlotte unable to pay his bills, Sylvie is persuaded into one last con. Their marks are the de Jacquinots: dysfunctional aristocrats who believe they are haunted by their great aunt, brutally murdered during the French Revolution. The scheme underway, the sisters deploy every trick to terrify the family out of their gold. But when inexplicable horrors start to happen to them, too, the duo question whether they really are at the mercy of a vengeful spirit. And what other deep, dark secrets may come to light? Perfect for fans of Sarah Waters and Sarah Penner, Spitting Gold is “an auspicious first outing from a writer to watch.
In Universes by Emet North
Raffi works in an observational cosmology lab, searching for dark matter. Every chance they get, they escape to see Britt, a queer sculptor who fascinates them for reasons they can’t understand. As Raffi’s carefully constructed life begins to collapse, they dream of a universe where they mean as much to Britt as Britt does to them. Touring parallel worlds, Raffi reaches for a life that feels authentically their own. But Raffi’s divergent existences all lead back to the summer of Britt: the terrible thing Raffi did and the guilt that continues to chase them across realities.
Henry Henry by Allen Bratton
It’s London, 2014, and Hal Lancaster, son and heir of Henry, Duke of Lancaster, is in a holding pattern: his mother is dead, his father is dying or remarrying or both, his siblings are fighting, his internship is pointless, and nobody will leave him alone. Everything is as it should be and yet nothing is right. Over the course of a year of partying, drinking, and flirting to dubious consequence, Hal is tested by brutal family legacies, Catholic guilt, and the terrifying possibility of being loved. All of which is complicated by a pattern of abuse that threatens to chase Hal into adulthood. The House of Lancaster will never be the same. Crackling with intelligence and wit, Henry Henry is a brilliant recasting of the Henriad in which Hal Lancaster is a queer protagonist for a new era. Allen Bratton arrives as a successor to Waugh and St. Aubyn with this lush, stylish novel of family, legacy, and what it means to be alive today.
Rough Trade by Katrina Carrasco
Washington Territory, 1888. With contacts on the docks and in the railroad, and with a buyers’ market funneling product their way, Alma Rosales and her opium-smuggling crew are making a fortune. They spend their days moving product and their nights at the Monte Carlo, the center of Tacoma’s queer scene, where skirts and trousers don’t signify and everyone’s free to suit themselves. Then two local men end up dead, with all signs pointing to the opium trade, and a botched effort to disappear the bodies draws lawmen to town. Alma scrambles to keep them away from her operation but is distracted by the surprise appearance of Bess Spencer–an ex-Pinkerton’s agent and Alma’s first love–after years of silence. A handsome young stranger comes to town, too, and falls into an affair with one of Alma’s crewmen. When he starts asking questions about opium, Alma begins to suspect she’s welcomed a spy into her inner circle, and is forced to consider how far she’ll go to protect her trade. Katrina Carrasco plunges readers into the vivid, rough-and-tumble world of the late-1800s Pacific Northwest in this genre- and gender-blurring novel. Rough Trade follows Carrasco’s critically acclaimed debut The Best Bad Things and reimagines queer communities, the turbulent early days of modern media and medicine, and the pleasures–and price–of satisfying desire.
A Good Happy Girl by Marissa Higgins
Helen, a jittery attorney with a self-destructive streak, is secretly reeling from a disturbing crime of neglect that her parents recently committed. Historically happy to compartmentalize – distracting herself by hooking up with lesbian couples, doting on her grandmother, and flirting with a young administrative assistant – Helen finally meets her match with Catherine and Katrina, a married couple who startle and intrigue her with their ever-increasing sexual and emotional intensity. Perceptive and attentive, Catherine and Katrina prod at Helen’s life, revealing a childhood tragedy she’s been repressing. When her father begs her yet again for help getting parole, she realizes that she has a bargaining chip to get answers to her past. In her exploration of queer domesticity, effects of incarceration on family, and intergenerational poverty, Marissa Higgins offers empathy to characters who don’t often receive it, with unsettling results.
Here We Go Again by Alison Cochrun
A long time ago, Logan Maletis and Rosemary Hale used to be friends. They spent their childhood summers running through the woods, rebelling against their conservative small town, and dreaming of escaping. But then an incident the summer before high school turned them into bitter rivals. After graduation, they went ten years without speaking. Now in their thirties, Logan and Rosemary find they aren’t quite living the lives of adventure they imagined for themselves. Still in their small town and working as teachers at their alma mater, they’re both stuck in old patterns. Uptight Rosemary chooses security and stability over all else, working constantly, and her most stable relationship is with her label maker. Chaotic and impulsive Logan has a long list of misguided ex-lovers and an apathetic shrug she uses to protect herself from anything real. And as hard as they try to avoid each other–and their complicated past–they keep crashing into each other. Including with their cars. But when their beloved former English teacher and lifelong mentor tells them he has only a few months to live, they’re forced together once and for all to fulfill his last wish: a cross-country road trip. Stuffed into the gayest van west of the Mississippi, the three embark on a life-changing summer trip–from Washington state to the Grand Canyon, from the Gulf Coast to coastal Maine–that will chart a new future and perhaps lead them back to one another.
All the World Beside by Garrard Conley
Cana, Massachusetts: a utopian vision of 18th-century Puritan New England. To the outside world, Reverend Nathaniel Whitfield and his family stand as godly pillars of their small-town community, drawing Christians from across the New World into their fold. One such Christian, physician Arthur Lyman, discovers in the minister’s words a love so captivating it transcends language. As the bond between these two men grows more and more passionate, their families must contend with a tangled web of secrets, lies, and judgments which threaten to destroy them in this world and the next. And when the religious ecstasies of the Great Awakening begin to take hold, igniting a new era of zealotry, Nathaniel and Arthur search for a path out of an impossible situation, imagining a future for themselves which has no name. Their wives and children must do the same, looking beyond the known world for a new kind of wilderness, both physical and spiritual. Set during the turbulent historical upheavals which shaped America’s destiny and following in the tradition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, All the World Beside reveals the very human lives just beneath the surface of dogmatic belief. Bestselling author Garrard Conley has created a page-turning, vividly imagined historical tale that is both a love story and a crucible.
How It Works Out by Myriam LaCroix
What if you had the chance to rewrite the course of your relationship, again and again, in the hopes that it would work out? When Myriam and Allison fall in love at a show in a run-down punk house, their relationship begins to unfold through a series of hypotheticals: What if they became mothers by finding a baby in an alley? What if the only cure for Myriam’s depression was Allison’s flesh? What if they were B-list celebrities, famous for writing a book about building healthy lesbian relationships? How much darker–or sexier–would their dynamic be if one were a power-hungry CEO, and the other her lowly employee? From the fantasies of early romance to the slow encroaching of violence that unravels the fantasy, each reality builds to complete a brilliant, painfully funny portrait of love’s many promises and perils.
The Sweet Sting of Salt by Rose Sutherland
When a sharp cry wakes Jean in the middle of the night during a terrible tempest, she’s convinced it must have been a dream. But when the cry comes again, Jean ventures outside and is shocked by what she discovers-a young woman in labor, drenched to the bonein the bitter cold and able to speak barely a word of English. Although Jean is the only midwife for miles around, she’s at a loss for who this woman is or where she’s from; Jean can only assume that she must be the new wife of the neighbor up the road, Tobias. And when Tobias does indeed arrive at her cabin in search of his wife, Muirin, Jean’s questions continue to multiply. Why has he kept his wife’s pregnancy a secret? And why does Muirin’s open demeanor change completely the moment she’s in his presence? Though Jean learned long ago that she should stay out of other people’s business, her growing concern-and growing feelings-for Muirin mean that she can’t simply set her worries aside. But when the answers she finds are more harrowing than she ever could have imagined, she fears she may have endangered herself, Muirin, and the baby. Will she be able to put things right and save the woman she loves before it’s too late, or will someone have to pay for Jean’s actions with their life?
A Deadly Walk in Devon by Nicholas George
After a long career as a detective in San Diego, Rick “Chase” Chasen has traded in his badge for a change of scenery in the coastal comforts of Devon, England, until a local murder takes him on a deadly detour… Still grieving the death of his long-time partner, Chase reunites with his dear friend and fellow Anglophile Billie Mondreau for a seacoast holiday of historic sightseeing. Assigned a pair of guides from the tour company Wanderers, Chase and Billie join seven other like-minded Americans looking forward to an English getaway. All except for Ronald Gretz. The wealthy entrepreneur behind the international Golden Sunset nursing home chain doesn’t like anything about walking, touring, or England. Coarse and opinionated, Gretz’s complaints get on the nerves of his fellow Wanderers–and his long-suffering trophy wife. But Gretz’s gripes are tied to his own nerves being frayed. He has been receiving threatening texts and emails signed “An Avenger.” Convinced someone means him harm, Gretz asks Chase to watch his back. Soon, Gretz falls afoul of several “accidents,” leading to more friction with the other walkers. Until one final “accident” results in Gretz dead at the bottom of a cliff. Chase, whose investigative instincts remain sharp, knows Gretz’s death was no accident. While helping the police investigate, he discovers that members of the tour group not only disliked the victim but had legitimate motives for wanting him dead. Now, he just has to uncover who among them is willing to kill…Â
Like Happiness by Ursula Villarreal-Moura
it’s 2015, and Tatum Vega feels that her life is finally falling into place. Living in sunny Chile with her partner Vera, she spends her days surrounded by art at the museum where she works. She loves this new life, but more than anything, she loves it for helping her forget the decade she spent in New York City; the years she spent orbiting the brilliant and famous author M. DomÃnguez. But when a reporter calls from the US asking for an interview, the careful separation Tatum has constructed between her past and present begins to crumble. DomÃnguez has been accused of assault by another woman, and the reporter is looking for corroboration. Tatum agrees to tell her story, but she begins with a clarification: while there are similarities, what happened to the other woman is not what happened to her. As Tatum is forced to reexamine the all-consuming but undefinable relationship that dominated so much of her early adulthood, long-buried questions surface. What did happen between them? And why is she still struggling with the mark the relationship left on her life? Searching for clarity, Tatum decides to tell her story a second way as well: in the form of a letter to DomÃnguez, recounting and reclaiming the totality of their relationship, from the moment they met to the night the relationship imploded. Told in a dual narrative that alternates between Tatum’s present-day and her letter, Like Happiness explores the nuances of a complicated and imbalanced relationship, catalyzing a reckoning with gender, celebrity, memory, Latinx identity, and the unexpected ways power dynamics can manifest.
Rainbow Black by Maggie Thrash
Lacey Bond has grown up in her parents’ hippie New Hampshire daycare, idolizing her blasphemous, ultra-fashionable sister, Éclair, chasing baby squirrels, and contemplating trees. Then the Satanic Panic hits – the moral hysteria that shook the United States by its shoulders in the 80s and 90s. It’s the summer of 1990 when Lacey’s parents are handcuffed, flung into the county jail, and faced with a torrent of jaw-dropping accusations from dozens of current and former daycare kids. The criminal trial that follows is one of several in the novel, and it marks the beginning of Lacey’s relentless effort to survive after her literal and figurative guardians vanish, one by one. After the hysteria results in a devastating murder, Lacey runs away and starts over in Montreal with a new identity. But will she ever escape the constant fear of being found out and having to face the trauma of the media spotlight all over again?
A Botanical Daughter by Noah Medlock
It is an unusual thing, to live in a botanical garden. But Simon and Gregor are an unusual pair of gentlemen. Hidden away in their glass sanctuary from the disapproving tattle of Victorian London, they are free to follow their own interests without interference. For Simon, this means long hours in the dark basement workshop, working his taxidermical art. Gregor’s business is exotic plants – lucrative, but harmless enough. Until his latest acquisition, a strange fungus which shows signs of intellect beyond any plant he’s seen, inspires him to attempt a masterwork: true intelligent life from plant matter. Driven by the glory he’ll earn from the Royal Horticultural Society for such an achievement, Gregor ignores the flaws in his plan: that intelligence cannot be controlled; that plants cannot be reasoned with; and that the only way his plant-beast will flourish is if he uses a recently deceased corpse for the substrate. The experiment – or Chloe, as she is named – outstrips even Gregor’s expectations, entangling their strange household. But as Gregor’s experiment flourishes, he wilts under the cost of keeping it hidden from jealous eyes. The mycelium grows apace in this sultry greenhouse. But who is cultivating whom?
To find more great books go to our book recommendation page and browse book lists created by the librarians at Robbins.