The 20 best LGBTQ books to gift this holiday season
Here are some of the best LGBTQ books this year to get lost in — or gift — from science fiction to poetry and everything in between and out.
Lamar Dawson
Lamar Dawson
In this series of personal essays, journalist and activist George M. Johnson covers topics such as gender identity, toxic masculinity, consent and Black joy while also exploring his childhood, adolescence and college years. The memoir has been optioned for television by Gabrielle Union.
A trans boy determined to prove his gender to his traditional Latinx family summons a ghost who refuses to leave in this bestselling young adult novel.
In this funny yet heartbreaking novel, Mike, a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant, and Benson, a Black day care teacher, have been together for a few good years — but now they're not sure why they're still a couple.
In this page-turning dystopian novel, massive floods lead to rampant homelessness and devastation, and a government-sanctioned regime seizes on the opportunity to round up communities of color, disabled people and LGBTQ people to put them into labor camps.
In this captivating novel that, according to NPR, was written for “romantic bisexual goths,” a desperate young woman in France makes a Faustian bargain in 1714 to live forever ― and is cursed to be forgotten by everyone she meets. Thus begins the extraordinary life of Addie LaRue and a dazzling adventure that plays out across centuries and continents. But everything changes when, after nearly 300 years, Addie stumbles across a young man in a hidden bookstore who remembers her name.
In this coming-of-age memoir, Talusan takes the reader on a journey of her life — from a precocious child with albinism in the Philippines to a Harvard scholarship student and eventually a transgender activist and writer. According to The New York Times Book Review, “Rather than flaying her identities one by one, she examines the links between them to illustrate that it is here, in the messy overlap, that a person is made.”
A sensitive teen newly arrived in Alabama falls in love, questions his faith and navigates a strange power in this bewitching Southern fiction novel.
Bibbins’ book-length poem sequence brings the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and ’90s into a new light.
For 50 years, Carl lived as a girl and a queer woman, building a career, a life and a loving marriage — yet still never realizing himself in full. In this memoir, Carl takes us inside the complex shifts and questions that arise as he transitions, including the alternating moments of self-discovery and estrangement.
Diaz centers queer Indigeneous people in this collection of love poems while also making readers examine the legacies of colonialism.
This is a haunting, young adult fantasy novel about grief and supporting one’s family no matter the cost. There are ghosts, a queer love triangle, mystery and music.
Rooted in the loss of one of Smith’s close friends, this book comes out of the search for joy and intimacy when both can seem scarce and getting scarcer.
Doyle, an activist, speaker and author of "Love Warrior," explores the joy and peace we discover when we stop striving to meet the expectations of the world and start trusting the voice within in this self-help bestseller.
In this psychological thriller, Nicholas Brink leaves New York City to join his boyfriend, Clay Guillory, in Italy. Clay comes into a small inheritance of counterfeit heirlooms and a share in a decrepit Venetian palazzo and tries to use Nick's connection to an antiques dealer to unload the fake silver on a brash, unsuspecting American.
In this collection of essays, Thomas — the creator of Elle’s “Eric Reads the News” — shares real-life stories about growing up, seeing the world differently and finding his joy.
This young adult fantasy is a fresh take on the classic "Cinderella" story that makes readers question the tales they’ve been told and root for girls to break down the constructs of the world around them.
In this collection of essays and personal mini-comics that span eight years of her young adult life, author-illustrator Stevenson charts the highs and lows of being a creative human in the world.
Iloh’s debut young adult novel about a young Nigerian girl named Ada attending a historically Black college explores queerness, agency and the pressures often put on first-generation children both socially and culturally.
The author, a self-described “transgender cripple-punk” who writes her name in all lowercase letters, challenges a canon that decides what shades of beauty deserve to live in a poem and honors bodies the world too often wants to bury.
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