7 of the Best New LGBTQ Books Out This Week

I love a messy sapphic book. If you’re a fan of Sad Girl Literature, this should be top of your TBR. Elsa is struggling after her breakup. She was seeing a couple, and they were her whole life. Now, she numbs out by scrolling Instagram endlessly. There, she becomes obsessed with an actor in an upcoming gay movie that is filming nearby. Her job as a hostess at an upscale restaurant brings her in close contact with him — and with his androgynous dinner companion, Sam, who Elsa is immediately drawn to.

This is a queer thriller that’s Kill Bill meets The Handmaiden meets Thelma and Louise. It’s set in 1970s Tokyo as the daughter of a mob boss and her female bodyguard/driver try to survive this cut-throat environment. Liberty Hardy recommended it on today’s All the Books episode — just be prepared for a lot of violence and gore.

Twenty-eight-year-old Isobel lives with her mother and her chinchilla Abigail in a small flat, where she deals with her mental health struggles by having a strict routine. She works part-time at a paint-your-own-pottery studio and channels her creativity into depictions of Abigail in a variety of mediums. Her life is upended when the Abigails catch the eye of reality TV star and artist Elizabeth Staggs, who offers her a job helping in her new arts documentary series. Soon, she’s moving into a flat with queer roommates in London, falling for one of them, and struggling to live up to the producer’s exacting standards. This is the opportunity of a lifetime, but will Issy be able to handle the pressure?

And here’s one I talked about on All the Books today! How much you will enjoy this book really comes down to how you feel about reading about a truly oblivious main character. The kind of person who googles, “Can you be straight and have sex dreams about your female best friend…every night?” and “Can you be straight and want to kiss one woman?” Cash is worried about her obvious crush on her best friend hurting the most important relationship in her and her daughter’s life — and causing Cash to have an identity crisis — but the attraction is getting harder to be able to deny.

In this dark academia thriller, Cal Ware is excited about the chance to reinvent himself at Essex Academy. He doesn’t have to be the poor, queer outsider anymore…except that his fellow students at Essex immediately spot that he’s not from money, and he’s soon just as isolated as before. Cal is about to give up and go home when he discovers a secret society at Essex. If he can get in, he’ll finally belong. He’s taken under the wing of charismatic society member Luke Kim, and soon Cal is falling for him. But the Rush rituals keep getting more dangerous, and Cal will have to decide how much he’s willing to sacrifice to fit in.

You might recognize Dean Atta as the author of The Black Flamingo, among others. In this memoir, Atta tells the story of his life through seven parts of his Black, queer body. It’s a “story of love, sex, fear, poetry, prejudice, death, and acceptance.” You can listen to an excerpt from the audiobook on Dean Atta’s Instagram.