10 Books to Read This Spring

The world is on fire, but at least we have gay people

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All-Night Pharmacy by Rachel Kushner (2024)

Rachel Kushner’s All-Night Pharmacy is a book about people behaving strangely – until it’s not. Our unnamed narrator is a recent high school graduate who spends most days following around her older sister, Debbie. After frequenting a bar one evening and taking a bag of pills, the night becomes increasingly unhinged. When Debbie disappears, the narrator must confront the nature of their toxic relationship.

She gets a job and attempts to get sober. She meets Sasha, a Jewish Soviet refugee who claims to be a psychic. Their relationship becomes friendly, and then sexual, and always confusing. Though it’s difficult to understand our narrator’s actions at first, one begins to root for her success and healing as the book goes on. Kushner doesn’t attempt to make the characters naturally likable. Indeed, our narrator and her social circle are filled with sharp edges, giving this world and its residents more vibrancy. Come for the madness, stay for the personal growth.

The Chronology of Water by Lidia Yuknavitch (2011)

Though it was published more than a decade ago, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Chronology of Water has become newly relevant again due to Kristen Stewart’s upcoming film adaptation of the book. If you’re the kind of person who likes reading the book before they see the movie, this one’s well worth your time. Yuknavitch’s fascinating memoir tracks several tumultuous periods in the author’s life. Raised by an abusive father, Yuknavitch escapes his clutches by getting a swimming scholarship to a school in Texas. After she gets kicked out for partying too hard, she attends the University of Oregon and works with Ken Kesey.

As Yuknavitch tells it, it took her many years to heal from the scars of her childhood and manage her relationship to drugs, alcohol, sex, and toxic relationships. While in Oregon, Yuknavitch explores bisexuality, BDSM, and psychedelics, slowly becoming more comfortable in her body – a body that functions best when it’s in the water. Both harrowing and thoughtful, the memoir pieces together Yuknavitch’s colorful life as if it were a jagged kaleidoscope.

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Anthony Doerr (2021)

Anthony Doerr is best known for his 2014 novel All the Light We Cannot See, which won a Pulitzer Prize and was adapted into a television show. His next book, Cloud Cuckoo Land, deserves just as many accolades. The novel takes place in several different time periods and countries around the world. Our cast of characters includes a young girl in 15th-century Constantinople and her unlikely ally, a man who spends 80 years of his life in small-town Idaho, a troubled young man in that same town, and a girl on a spaceship in the 22nd century.

Though they appear totally disconnected, these individuals are linked together by an Ancient Greek Codex that impacts each character in their own way. Epic in every sense of the word, the book effortlessly weaves these stories together, touching on hope, despair, and the destruction of our natural world. If you liked The Overstory by Richard Powers or The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon, you’re primed to enjoy Cloud Cuckoo Land. There is one queer character in this book, but the identities of these characters is hardly the point. Instead, one of the focuses of the novel is that inextricable aspect of humanity that connects us all across vast differences of time and space.

Dryland by Sara Jaffe (2015)

The protagonist of Sara Jaffe’s Dryland is slow to reveal herself to the reader, but that’s because she hasn’t figured out who she is yet. Set in Portland, Oregon, in 1992, the novel follows Julie, a 15-year-old girl merely going through the motions of daily life. She and her best friend frequent the skate park to watch the boys, an activity she has little interest in. When a popular girl asks Julie to join the swim team, she agrees, and her relationship with Julie grows confusingly close. Meanwhile, her older brother has moved away for reasons she isn’t sure of, and current events – the AIDS crisis, the war in Yugoslavia – serve as the little-noticed backdrop to her adolescent growing pains.

Jaffe’s prose is laconic and often leaves much unsaid, but still punctures the heart of the issue. It’s easy to interpret Julie’s actions and feelings as readers and adults, but her life and actions sometimes feel opaque to Julie herself. Indeed, one of the joys of reading Dryland is witnessing Julie slowly discover what she wants and who she is, despite the awkward way she goes about it. Though identifiable as a queer coming-of-age story, the book resists easy lessons and any sort of heroic arc – much like adoslesnce itself.

Feast While You Can by Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta (2024)

Authored by one of several queer writing partners working at the moment, Mikaella Clements and Onjuli Datta’s fantasy/horror/romance book Feast While You Can is as disquieting as it is gorgeous. Set in an Italian-ish mountain town called Cadenze, the novel follows a 20-something local named Angelina. Her ordinary life with her brother Patrick becomes more complicated with the arrival of Jagvi, Patrick’s ex-girlfriend and Angelina’s…. nemesis? Ex-friend? Something else? Jagvi’s return sparks a long-dormant evil that resides in the caves to come to life and attach itself to Angelina.

The monster begins to literally take over her life, controlling Angelina from the inside and possessing her dog in order to speak. The trio discovers that Jagvi’s touch is the only thing that keeps the creature at bay, forcing the two estranged women together. What follows is both haunting and tender, as Angelina and Jagvi explore what they mean to one another all while trying to defeat this ancient evil. With its unique setting, antagonist, and characters, Feast While You Can is a riveting novel that takes the ideas of queer consumption, monstrosity, and desire to never-before-seen places.

Kept Animals by Kate Milliken (2020)

Similar to Dryland, Kept Animals follows a young protagonist who keeps her feelings close to the chest. Also like that book, it centers on a 15-year-old girl in the 1990s. In this case, she’s Rory Ramos, who lives in Topanga Canyon and works as a ranch hand alongside her stepfather. Her job consists of riding the horses of rich folks, some of whom she develops unique relationships with. There’s out-and-proud lesbian June and her brother Wade, and Rory’s mysterious neighbor, Vivian. Rory and Vivian grow close, but bubbling tension leads to a fire that changes the course of their lives.

The book is narrated by Rory’s daughter, Charlie, 20 years after that fateful evening. Rory hasn’t told Charlie much about her life, and Charlie’s determined to uncover the truth on her own. As her daughter knows all too well, Rory is a woman of few words, and getting to know her is a difficult task. Nonetheless, Milliken’s clever prose and the air of precarity that envelops the story make the novel a compelling read. For horse girls – and horse lesbians – everywhere, Kept Animals finds a new way into this iconographic setting.

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang (2023)

One of four books on this list that addresses climate change, Land of Milk and Honey has little in common with any dystopian climate stories that have come before it. Zhang’s enchanting novel takes place several years after a crop-destroying smog has spread across the world. Our protagonist escapes a dead-end job as a chef in France by accepting an offer to work at a mysterious “elite research community,” traveling to a remote hilltop in the Italian Alps that has remained untouched by the smog. The unnamed chef meets her employer, a mercurial, somewhat unhinged capitalist, and his beautiful but mysterious daughter, Aida, a geneticist who leads much of the community’s research.

Aida and the chef develop an intimate relationship driven by pleasure – much of it in relation to food and eating, but this leads them to carnal pleasures as well. Zhang’s precise, descriptive writing hones in on the senses during these moments of pleasure, describing the food not only by how it looks and tastes, but also what it feels like in the mouth and the memories it invokes. Despite the novel’s apocalyptic backdrop, this protected Garden of Eden brings a brightness into the protagonist’s world. Come for a wholly inventive take on climate change, stay for the pleasures of the flesh.

Perfume and Pain by Anna Dorn (2024)

If you can’t handle prickly, frequently unsympathetic protagonists, you might want to put Perfume and Pain back on the shelf. But if you’re willing to get in the head of someone without loads of redeeming qualities (why not? live a little!), Anna Dorn’s 2024 novel has a lot to offer. Perfume and Pain follows Astrid Dahl, a mildly successful lesbian novelist. When Dahl gets briefly “canceled” for one of her many controversial opinions, she re-joins a lesbian writing group she co-founded. There, she develops an obsession with the beautiful and mysterious Ivy, a grad student studying lesbian pulps. Another object of fascination is Penelope, Astrid’s neighbor, whom she can’t tell if she abhors or lusts after.

Astrid almost always makes bad decisions and doesn’t treat people very well. Part of this is her toxic relationship with drugs and alcohol, and part of it, we presume, is just her personality. Incisive and cutting, Perfume and Pain presents these messy situations with humor. The grittier aspects of the book are a nod to lesbian pulp novels, as the title, the name of a fictional lesbian pulp, suggests. Another reason to read? Clea Duvall is set to write and direct a series based on the book.

Private Rites by Julia Armfield (2024)

Yet another book where climate change serves as the backdrop, Julia Armfield’s Private Rites takes place in the not-so-distant future. Set in a world of constant rain and flooding, the novel follows three sisters, Irene, Isla, and Agnes, in a creative re-imagining of King Lear. The confrontational Irene is struggling in her marriage, the stern Isla can’t seem to escape her ex-wife, and the aloof Agnes, the youngest of the trio, is slowly transitioning out of her solitary existence while falling in love. (One of many differences between Private Rites and Shakespeare – all three sisters are queer.)

When their father–a renowned architect who often treated his daughters cruelly–dies, the three at-odds sisters are forced to come together and confront the family legacy. Meanwhile, something sinister is lurking in the shadows, something that might explain their mother’s disappearance and the strangers who have been hanging around. Will the sisters reconcile? And will it ever stop raining? Armfield is sly enough not to give us all the answers, instead inviting the reader to steep in these unusual circumstances alongside our protagonists.

If you haven’t read Armfield’s debut, Our Wives Under The Sea, it’s worth adding to your list as well.

The Shutouts by Gabrielle Korn (2024)

Can you guess the premise of Gabrielle Korn’s The Shutouts? If you guessed climate apocalypse, you’d be right. But that’s not precisely what the book’s about – rather, it’s the backdrop for a profound story about human resilience and connection in the face of disaster. Our protagonists exist across several time periods, on the margins of what is left of society. While writing letters to her daughter, whom she left years ago under mysterious circumstances, Kelly recounts how she got to where she is. Ava and her daughter, Brooke, have escaped a government-funded community where their bodies were used for nefarious means and run into Orchid, a woman from Ava’s past. Max has escaped from a cult filled with dark secrets, and they run into Camilla, a nomad living off the land.

Most of these characters are queer, though their lives hardly follow any conventional queer timeline. Still, it’s their connection to one another – whether familial love, romantic love, or found community – that powers the story. Far from cynical, the book instead imagines a dystopic world where life is still possible, and where hope remains. The architects of this hope? Queer women and non-binary people with the imagination, and the drive, to create something new.

The Shutouts is a follow-up to Korn’s previous book, Yours for the Taking, which tracks characters like Ava and Brooke who are living in an exclusive government-funded compound called the Inside Project. You don’t need to read that book to read The Shutouts, but if you want to read both, Yours for the Taking technically comes first.

Other Hot (queer-ish) Books that I can confirm are worth the hype: Housemates by Emma Copley Eisenberg, All Fours by Miranda July, Blue Sisters by Coco Mellors

Other books I’ve written about that I would recommend: The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia, We Do What We Do in the Dark by Michelle Hart, Mrs. S by K. Patrick, Shifting Gears by Jazz Forrester, City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter