Find Your Next Favorite Read in 10 Years of Read Harder Challenges!

Former best friends-turned-partners Theo and Kit (both bisexual) are now estranged exes. Years after their painful breakup, both use expiring vouchers for a tour across Europe they never took and discover they’ve been placed in the same group.

To lighten up the trip, they start a casual hookup competition…but what happens when they realize who they really want to be with and that it may be too late? Queer chaos, that’s what. —CJ Connor

This collection of short stories by Canadian Nishnaabeg writer and activist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson follows a wide spectrum of Indigenous characters in small towns, cities, and reserves. Simpson’s writing is one of a kind, a mix of prose and poetry that explores how communities survive and thrive even in the face of continued oppression. She is also a musician and has released an album of the same name. —Kathleen Keenan

Kirk Johnson was fly fishing when he was told a wild story by his guide. There was an American orchestral musician on tour in England who broke into a natural history museum to steal hundreds of old bird skins. Why? To use the feathers to make old-fashioned Victorian ties for fly fishing, which was his obsession. That was all the guide knew about the theft. But Johnson became so captivated by this tale and determined to find out what happened to the musician and the skins he stole that he wound up investigating it himself. —Liberty Hardy

Percival Everett reimagines The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from Jim’s point of view in this action-packed take on the American classic. When Jim hears he is about to be sold away from his wife and daughter, he hides out on Jackson Island, where he soon runs into young Huck Finn. The two set off on a raft down the Mississippi River on a quest to reach the elusive promise of the Free States. It’s very much like the story you know, but Everett imbues Jim with all the intelligence and agency he always deserved to have. —Rachel Brittain

This is one of my personal favorite nonfiction books about anti-racism. Love details the ways in which racism and intersectional oppression permeate the structure of our schools. Illustrated with anecdotes from her experience as a Black child and later as a teacher of Black and Brown children, the book presents research in a practical way. Ultimately, Love posits that “education can’t save us—we have to save education.” —Mikkaka Overstreet

A haunted bookstore, a stolen manuscript, and a woman formerly imprisoned for stealing a dead body take center stage in this incredible new story from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Louise Erdrich. Books and fiction are absolutely central to this novel. They’re what helped Tookie survive prison and what she does for a living now. She also believes it’s a book that killed the former bookshop regular now haunting her. Erdrich herself even makes a fictionalized appearance in the book.

Fair warning: this book deals quite heavily with the start (and progression) of the COVID-19 Pandemic in the U.S. as well as the murder of George Floyd and police protests. —Rachel Brittain

A number of books about women and anger have been published recently—a fact which should surprise no one! Eloquent Rage is one of the best of these. Here, Brittney Cooper looks at the power of anger to motivate and inspire women, particularly Black women, to keep fighting oppression. The book contains personal essays on a range of subjects, each one looking at the ways Black women’s anger is both justified and powerful. —Rebecca Hussey