Archives de catégorie : LGBTQ+

TWENTY YEARS TOGETHER de Tom Rob Smith

A shattering and beautiful love story, the most personal and powerful piece of storytelling by New York Times bestselling author of Child 44 and The Farm.

TWENTY YEARS TOGETHER
by Tom Rob Smith
Simon & Schuster, Spring 2026
(via Aaron Priest Literary)

Danny and Luis have been a couple for twenty years. Piece-by-piece, they’ve built a life together. They’ve created a home. They’ve comforted and held each other up through challenges and tragedies. They’ve shared happiness and they’ve shared joy.

The one thing they didn’t have was the one thing that, when they first met, was denied them: the possibility of marriage. They’ve witnessed the weddings of their friends, but the law was clear and would not recognize the union of two men.

But the law has now changed. Marriage, for the first time, would be legal. So while celebrating the 20th wedding anniversary of their close friends, Danny realizes he’s ready for more from his relationship with Luis. He wants them to be married.

He wants to declare their shared past as the start of their renewed future. He proposes to Luis, and the moment he does, he risks everything they’ve built falling apart.

Deeply felt and remarkably tender, TWENTY YEARS TOGETHER is a profound exploration of the bonds we create with each other, of the tension between living authentically against the expectations of family and community, and, most of all, of desire, romance and love.

Tom Rob Smith is the New York Times bestselling author of the acclaimed Child 44 trilogy. Child 44 itself was a global publishing sensation, selling over two million copies. Among its many honors, it was longlisted for the Booker Prize, shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Prize and won the CWA Steel Dagger Award and ITW Award for Best First Novel. His novel The Farm was a number 1 international bestseller and the first crime thriller to be longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize. Tom also writes for television and won a Writer’s Guild Award for best adapted series and an Emmy and Golden Globe for best limited series with American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. His recent original series Class of 09 was released on Hulu in the USA and Disney Plus around the world. The Farm is currently being adapted as a series for the BBC and Swedish Broadcaster SVT.

MIDNIGHT AT THE CINEMA PALACE de Christopher Tradowsky

This tender, exuberant novel about a young man navigating coming of age in’90s San Francisco is perfect for readers of Garth Greenwell and André Aciman.

MIDNIGHT AT THE CINEMA PALACE
by Christopher Tradowsky
Simon & Schuster, June 2025
(via Neon Literary)

Walter Simmering is searching for love and purpose in a city he doesn’t realize is fading away—San Francisco in 1993, at the height of the AIDS epidemic and the dawn of the tech revolution. Out of college, out of the closet, and transplanted from the Midwest, Walter is irresistibly drawn from his shell when he meets Cary Menuhin and Sasha Stravinsky, a dynamic couple who live blithely beyond the boundaries of gender and sexuality. Witty and ultra-stylish, Cary and Sasha seem to have stepped straight out of a sultry film noir, captivating Walter through a shared obsession with cinema and Hollywood’s golden age.

As the three embark on adventures across the city, filled with joie de vivre, their lively friendship evolves in unexpected ways. When Walter befriends Lawrence, a filmmaker and former child actor living with HIV, they pursue a film project of their own, with hilarious and tragic results.

MIDNIGHT AT THE CINEMA PALACE is a vibrant and nostalgic exploration of young souls discovering themselves amidst the backdrop of a disappearing city. Christopher Tradowsky’s astonishing debut captures the essence of ’90s queer culture and the complex lives of friends seeking an aesthetically beautiful and fulfilling way of life.

Christopher Tradowsky is a writer, artist, and art historian. He was awarded the 2023 J. Michael Samuel Prize from the Lambda Literary Foundation. He lives in St. Paul, Minnesota. MIDNIGHT AT THE CINEMA PALACE is his debut novel.

UNPRECEDENTED TIMES de Malavika Kannan

Malavika Kannan stands on the shoulders of The Idiot, Luster, the works of Sally Rooney and Honor Levy, asking: Which comes first: experience or narrative?

UNPRECEDENTED TIMES
by Malavika Kannan
Holt/Macmillan, Fall 2026
(via Levine Greenberg Rostan Literary)

Our story begins as a love letter to the distinct, batshit, yet canonical experience of the Queer Homoerotic Friendship. We enter the coming-of-age story of Rishi, an Indian-American girl from Orlando who beaches herself on the shores of Stanford “for the plot.” She sees nothing ahead of her except freedom, experience and love, and begins her journey with her sexuality and queerness as fast as humanly possible. Her roommate Georgia, a wealthy white girl from Maine and the daughter of two scientists, quickly becomes her best friend and confidant in all things. But the friends and love affairs that fill Rishi’s days (and the recaps she gives Georgia every night) and make her believe she is truly becoming herself begin to unravel with the abrupt onset of Covid. (I haven’t yet seen a Gen Z voice that talks about this period and the intense loss of possibility, just when they had reached the thing that had worked so hard for: college!).

Rishi and Georgia and their friends endure going back to the homes they had just left, but soon strike out on a new adventure: the Covid Gap year, where they join a farm collective and grapple with political radicalization and growing disillusionment…along with sexual tension and responsibility. Things start to get interesting with Georgia: she and Rishi get drunk and make out. Rishi thinks that she and Georgia have « gotten past » the kiss — she rationalizes it to herself that it is very normal for best friends to kiss, and if they are meant to be in love, they will figure it out much later. Georgia thinks otherwise.

Rishi has been focused on herself as the main character of her story, one rooted in her feminist and queer sensibilities of progress and agency, but by the end of the novel she faces painful experiences that shatter her sense of narrative, so all she can really do is feel her way through it, and trust that she will understand it later. Along for the ride, we may see the mistakes Rishi is making, but we learn something about ourselves and the world around us alongside her.

Malavika Kannan is a writer and organizer from Florida. According to men online she is « lazy, dumb, and loose, » but she prefers to identify as an advocate for queer women of color, online and IRL. She’s been featured by Seventeen Magazine, Good Morning America, and elsewhere, and graduated from Stanford University this year. Her YA novel, All the Yellow Suns was published by Little & Brown in 2023. She’s also written about Gen Z and culture for San Francisco Chronicle, Washington Post, Teen Vogue, and elsewhere. She draws viral cartoons and posts about queer identity for an audience of 40,000 across Instagram and TikTok. Her villain origin story is that, as a teenager in Florida, she organized with March for Our Lives and the Women’s March, and is forever committed to centering queer youth in movements for justice and joy.

A PRINCE AMONG PIRATES de Katie Abdou

A foppish nobleman accidentally joins a pirate ship and falls for his debonair captain.

A PRINCE AMONG PIRATES
by Katie Abdou
Simon & Schuster, Spring 2026
(via Mushens Entertainment)

Kit Davenport is impulsive, headstrong, a little too sure of himself, and desperate to get out from under his father’s thumb. Oh—he’s also the son of a Viscount, and days away from marrying a future marchioness.

But Kit doesn’t want to marry and become trapped in his father’s world of white wigs, dull dinner parties, and odious meetings in the House of Lords.

A string of dubious choices lands him on the crew of Captain Reggie Sharpe’s galleon, the Deliverance. There’s just one problem: Kit has no idea they’re pirates.

PS: Kit can’t swim.

Katie Abdou was born and raised in historic coastal Massachusetts, USA—where she cultivated a love of history, the occult, and piracy. Her goal is for her work to be a safe space for teens and young adults to experience both the good and bad in the world by exploring topics of self-discovery, ethnicity, sexuality, found family, and acceptance—with a dash of myth and magic.

MILENA AND MARGARETE de Gwen Strauss

A profoundly moving and expertly researched WWII history from the author of The Nine. A celebration of love under the darkest of circumstances, Strauss sheds light on both an untold WWII love story and an untold chapter in queer history.

MILENA AND MARGARETE:
A Love Story in Ravensbrück
by Gwen Strauss
St. Martin’s Press, August 2025

From the moment they met in 1940 in Ravensbrück concentration camp, Milena Jesenska and Margarete Buber-Neumann were inseparable. Czech Milena was Kafka’s first translator and epistolary lover and a journalist opposed to fascism. A non-conformist, bi-sexual feminist, she was way ahead of her time. With the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, her home became a central meeting place for Jewish refugees. German Margarete, born to a middle-class family, married the son of the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. But soon swept up in the fervor of the Bolshevik Revolution, she met her second partner, the Communist Heinz Neumann. Called to Moscow for his “political deviations,” he fell victim to Stalin’s purges while Margarete was exiled to the hell of the Soviet gulag. Two years later, traded by Stalin to Hitler, she ended up outside Berlin in Ravensbrück, the only concentration camp built for women.

Milena and Margarete loved each other at the risk of their lives. But in the post-war survivors’ accounts, lesbians were stigmatized, and survivors kept silent. This book explores those silences and finally celebrates two strong women who never gave up and continue to inspire. As Margarete wrote: “I was thankful for having been sent to Ravensbrück, because it was there I met Milena.”

Gwen Strauss is the author of The Nine and a collection of poetry, Trail of Stones. Her poems, short stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals including The New Republic, London Sunday Times, New England Review, and Kenyon Review. She was born and spent her early years in Haiti. Strauss lives in Southern France, where she is the Executive Director of the Dora Maar Cultural Center.