LGBTQIA+ Fiction Ebooks
You’ll love our rainbow of LGBTQIA+ fiction ebooks centered on the queer experience. From sweet romances to edge-of-your-seat crime stories, these queer novels honor LGBTQIA+ experiences and the journey to love, acceptance, and equality for everyone. Discover your new favorite queer novel today.
You’ll love our rainbow of LGBTQIA+ fiction ebooks centered on the queer experience. From sweet romances to edge-of-your-seat crime stories, these queer novels honor LGBTQIA+ experiences and the journey to love, acceptance, and equality for everyone. Discover your new favorite queer novel today.
Spotlight
“A remarkable feat of literary conjuration.” —Jennifer Haigh, nationally bestselling author of Mercy Street The acclaimed author of The Serpent’s Gift returns with this gripping and powerful novel of healing, redemption, and love, following a queer Black woman who works to stay clean, pull her life together, and heal after being released from prison. Ranita Atwater is “getting short.” She is almost done with her four-year sentence for opiate possession at Oak Hills Correctional Center. With three years of sobriety, she is determined to stay clean and regain custody of her two children. My name is Ranita, and I’m an addict, she has said again and again at recovery meetings. But who else is she? Who might she choose to become? As she claims the story housed within her pomegranate-like heart, she is determined to confront the weight of the past and discover what might lie beyond mere survival. Ranita is regaining her freedom, but she’s leaving behind her lover Maxine, who has inspired her to imagine herself and the world differently. Now she must steer clear of the temptations that have pulled her down, while atoning for her missteps and facing old wounds. With a fierce, smart, and sometimes funny voice, Ranita reveals how rocky and winding the path to wellness is for a Black woman, even as she draws on family, memory, faith, and love in order to choose life. Perfect for fans of Jesmyn Ward and Yaa Gyasi, Pomegranate is a complex portrayal of queer Black womanhood and marginalization in America: a story of loss, healing, redemption, and strength. In lyrical and precise prose, Helen Elaine Lee paints a humane and unflinching portrait of the devastating effects of incarceration and addiction, and of one woman’s determination to tell her story.
Trending ebooks
The Priory of the Orange Tree Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5This Is How It Always Is: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The End of Eddy: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ghost Wall: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Perfect Peace: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Chosen and the Beautiful Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Female Man Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Cabin at the End of the World: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Footprints in the Sand Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Young Mungo Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Folding Star: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Light From Uncommon Stars Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5We the Animals Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Summer Sons Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Docile Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Lost Future of Pepperharrow Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5History of Violence: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Man Who Saw Everything Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Ten Thousand Saints: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Girl, Woman, Other: A Novel (Booker Prize Winner) Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Full Circle Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Trouble and her Friends Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Gilda Stories: Expanded 25th Anniversary Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Was: a novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Cleanness Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5While England Sleeps: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Sorrowland: A Novel Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The World of Normal Boys Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Find Me: A Novel Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5
Discover more in LGBTQIA+ Fiction
Buzzy new favorites
A Safe Girl to Love A new edition of the acclaimed debut story collection by two-time Lambda Literary Award winner Casey Plett. By the author of Little Fish and A Dream of a Woman: eleven unique short stories featuring young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love in settings ranging from a rural Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn. These stories, shiny with whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show that growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but will never be predictable. A Safe Girl to Love, winner of the Lambda Literary Award for transgender fiction, was first published in 2014. Now back in print after a long absence, this new edition includes an afterword by the author. This publication meets the EPUB Accessibility requirements and it also meets the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG-AA). It is screen-reader friendly and is accessible to persons with disabilities. A Simple book with few images, which is defined with accessible structural markup. This book contains various accessibility features such as alternative text for images, table of contents, page-list, landmark, reading order and semantic structure.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Winter Knight Arthurian legends are reborn in this upbeat queer urban fantasy with a mystery at its heart The knights of the round table are alive in Vancouver, but when one winds up dead, it’s clear the familiar stories have taken a left turn. Hildie, a Valkyrie and the investigator assigned to the case, wants to find the killer — and maybe figure her life out while she’s at it. On her short list of suspects is Wayne, an autistic college student and the reincarnation of Sir Gawain, who these days is just trying to survive in a world that wasn’t made for him. After finding himself at the scene of the crime, Wayne is pulled deeper into his medieval family history while trying to navigate a new relationship with the dean’s charming assistant, Bert — who also happens to be a prime murder suspect. To figure out the truth, Wayne and Hildie have to connect with dangerous forces: fallen knights, tricky runesmiths, the Wyrd Sisters of Gastown. And a hungry beast that stalks Wayne’s dreams. The Winter Knight is a propulsive urban fairy tale and detective story with queer and trans heroes that asks what it means to be a myth, who gets to star in these tales, and ultimately, how we make our stories our own.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChrysalis Genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community. A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home. The stories in Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, are by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the real world and worlds beyond. Varghese delves fearlessly into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation, taking aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revelling in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsGhost Town A NEW YORK TIMES MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF FALL 2022 FROM THE BEST-SELLING AUTHOR & WINNER OF THE TAIWAN LITERATURE AWARD Keith Chen, the second son of a traditional Taiwanese family of seven, runs away from the oppression of his village to Berlin in the hope of finding acceptance as a young gay man. The novel begins a decade later, when Chen has just been released from prison for killing his boyfriend. He is about to return to his family’s village, a poor and desolate place. With his parents gone, his sisters married, mad, or dead, there is nothing left for him there. As the story unfurls, we learn what tore this family apart and, more importantly, the truth behind the murder of Chen’s boyfriend. Told in a myriad of voices, both living and dead, and moving through time with deceptive ease, Ghost Town weaves a mesmerizing web of family secrets and countryside superstitions, the search for identity and clash of cultures. ★ “Multidimensional characters, a beautifully realized setting, and an apposite surprise ending... This book is excellent.”—Booklist (Starred Review)
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Concerning My Daughter: A Novel Prize-winning Korean author Kim Hye-Jin’s debut confronts familial love, duty, mortality, and generational schism through the incendiary gaze of a tradition-bound mother faced with her daughter’s queer relationship. When a widowed, aging mother allows Green, her thirty-something daughter, to move into her apartment, all she wants for her is a stable and quiet existence like her own. Ideally, a steady income and, most importantly, a good husband with whom to start a family. But when Green turns up with her long-term girlfriend in tow, her mother is enraged and unwilling to welcome their relationship into her home. Having centered her life on her husband and child, her daughter’s definition of family is not one she can accept. Green’s involvement in a campus protest against unfair dismissals of gay colleagues throws her into deeper shambles. Meanwhile, the nursing home where she works insists that she lower her standard of care for Jen, an elderly dementia patient who traveled the world as a successful diplomat, chose not to have children, and has no family. Outraged, Green’s mother begins to reconsider the unfair consequences of choosing one’s own path. With bracing honesty, Kim Hye-jin taps into the complexities of mother-daughter dynamics while unearthing the mechanisms of violence that target LGBTQ communities in traditional societies. Elegantly translated from the Korean by Jamie Chang, Concerning My Daughter shines a light on all facets of familial love and conflict.
Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQuerelle of Roberval Shortlisted for the Atwood Gibson Writers' Trust Fiction Prize Homage to Jean Genet’s antihero and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of the Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge. As a millworkers’ strike in the northern lumber town of Roberval drags on, tensions start to escalate between the workers—but when a lockout renews their solidarity, they rally around the mysterious and magnetic influence of Querelle, a dashing newcomer from Montreal. Strapping and unabashed, likeable but callow, by day he walks the picket lines and at night moves like a mythic Adonis through the ranks of young men who flock to his apartment for sex. As the dispute hardens and both sides refuse to yield, sand stalls the gears of the economic machine and the tinderbox of class struggle and entitlement ignites in a firestorm of passions carnal and violent. Trenchant social drama, a tribute to Jean Genet’s antihero, and a brilliant reimagining of the ancient form of tragedy, Querelle of Roberval, winner of France’s Marquis de Sade Prize, is a wildly imaginative story of justice, passion, and murderous revenge.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Briefly, A Delicious Life: A Novel *A Cosmopolitan Best Book of Summer * One of BuzzFeed’s Most Anticipated LGBTQ+ Books* An “exquisite…too lovely to bear” (The New York Times Book Review) debut novel from an award-winning writer: a playful and daring tale about a teenage ghost who falls in love with the writer George Sands. In 1473, fourteen-year-old Blanca dies in a hilltop monastery in Mallorca. Nearly four hundred years later, when George Sand, her two children, and her lover Frederic Chopin arrive in the village, Blanca is still there: a spirited, funny, righteous ghost, she’s been hanging around the monastery since her accidental death, spying on the monks and the townspeople and keeping track of her descendants. Blanca is enchanted the moment she sees George, and the magical novel unfolds as a story of deeply felt, unrequited longing—a teenage ghost pining for a woman who can’t see her and doesn’t know she exists. As George and Chopin, who wear their unconventionality, in George’s case, literally on their sleeves, find themselves in deepening trouble with the provincial, 19th-century villagers, Blanca watches helplessly and reflects on the circumstances of her own death (which involved an ill-advised love affair with a monk-in-training). Charming, original, and emotionally moving, this “deeply wild debut follows the unconventional love triangle” (Cosmopolitan) between George, Chopin, and Blanca—a gorgeous and surprising exploration of artistry, desire, and life after death.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Unwieldy Creatures Unwieldy Creatures, a biracial, queer, nonbinary retelling of Mary Shelley's classic novel Frankenstein, follows the story of three beings who all navigate life from the margins: Plum, a queer biracial Chinese intern at one of the world's top embryology labs, who runs away from home to openly be with her girlfriend only to be l
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Brother Alive From the finalist for the NBCC John Leonard Prize and NYPL Young Lions Award, an astonishing debut novel about family, sexuality, and capitalist systems of control, following three adopted brothers who live above a mosque in Staten Island with their imam father In 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul, and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and share a bedroom perched atop a mosque in one of Staten Island’s most diverse and underserved neighborhoods. The three boys are an inseparable trio, but conspicuous: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean, and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern. Youssef shares everything with his brothers, except for one secret: he sees a hallucinatory double, an imaginary friend who seems absolutely real, a shapeshifting familiar he calls Brother. Brother persists as a companion into Youssef’s adult life, supporting him but also stealing his memories and shaking his grip on the world. The boys’ adoptive father, Imam Salim, is known in the community for his stirring and radical sermons, but at home he often keeps himself to himself, spending his evenings in his study with whiskey-laced coffee, reading poetry or writing letters to his former compatriots back in Saudi Arabia. Like Youssef, he too has secrets, including the cause of his failing health and the truth about what happened to the boys’ parents. When, years later, Imam Salim’s path takes him back to Saudi Arabia, the boys, now adults, will be forced to follow. There they will be captivated by an opulent, almost futuristic world, a linear city that seems to offer a more sustainable modernity than that of the West. But this conversion has come at a great cost, and Youssef and Brother too will have to decide if they should change to survive, or try to mount a defense of their deeply-held beliefs. Stylistically brilliant, intellectually acute, and deft in its treatment of complex themes, Brother Alive is a remarkable debut by a hugely talented writer that questions the nature of belief and explores the possibility of reunion for those who are broken.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Keya Das's Second Act A poignant, heartwarming, and charmingly funny debut novel about how a discovered box in the attic leads one Bengali American family down a path toward understanding the importance of family, even when splintered. Shantanu Das is living in the shadows of his past. In his fifties, he finds himself isolated from his traditional Bengali community after a devastating divorce from his wife, Chaitali; he hasn’t spoken to his eldest daughter Mitali in months; and most painfully, he lives each day with the regret that he didn’t accept his teenaged daughter Keya after she came out as gay. As the anniversary of Keya’s death approaches, Shantanu wakes up one morning utterly alone in his suburban New Jersey home and realizes it’s finally time to move on. This is when Shantanu discovers a tucked-away box in the attic that could change everything. He calls Mitali and pleads with her to come home. She does so out of pity, not realizing that her life is about to shift. Inside the box is an unfinished manuscript that Keya and her girlfriend were writing. It’s a surprising discovery that brings Keya to life briefly. But Neesh Desai, a new love interest for Mitali with regrets of his own, comes up with a wild idea, one that would give Keya more permanence: what if they are to stage the play? It could be an homage to Keya’s memory, and a way to make amends. But first, the Dases need to convince Pamela Moore, Keya’s girlfriend, to give her blessing. And they have to overcome ghosts from the past they haven’t met yet. A story of redemption and righting the wrongs of the past, Keya Das’s Second Act is a warmly drawn homage to family, creativity, and second chances. Set in the vibrant world of Bengalis in the New Jersey suburbs, this debut novel is both poignant and, at times, a surprising hilarious testament to the unexpected ways we build family and find love, old and new.
Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Dawnhounds Gideon the Ninth meets Black Sun in this queer, Māori-inspired debut fantasy about a police officer who is murdered, brought back to life with a mysterious new power, and tasked with protecting her city from an insidious evil threatening to destroy it. The port city of Hainak is alive: its buildings, its fashion, even its weapons. But, after a devastating war and a sweeping biotech revolution, all its inhabitants want is peace, no one more so than Yat Jyn-Hok a reformed-thief-turned-cop who patrols the streets at night. Yat has recently been demoted on the force due to “lifestyle choices” after being caught at a gay club. She’s barely holding it together, haunted by memories of a lover who vanished and voices that float in and out of her head like radio signals. When she stumbles across a dead body on her patrol, two fellow officers gruesomely murder her and dump her into the harbor. Unfortunately for them, she wakes up. Resurrected by an ancient power, she finds herself with the new ability to manipulate life force. Quickly falling in with the pirate crew who has found her, she must race against time to stop a plague from being unleashed by the evil that has taken root in Hainak.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Just by Looking at Him: A Novel From the star of Peacock’s Queer as Folk and the Netflix series Special comes a “funny, tender, and beautiful” (Gary Janetti, New York Times bestselling author) novel following a gay TV writer with cerebral palsy as he fights addiction and searches for acceptance in an overwhelmingly ableist world. Elliott appears to be living the dream as a successful TV writer with a doting boyfriend. But behind his Instagram filter of a life, he’s grappling with an intensifying alcohol addiction, he can’t seem to stop cheating on his boyfriend with various sex workers, and his cerebral palsy is making him feel like gay Shrek. After falling down a rabbit hole of sex, drinking, and Hollywood backstabbing, Elliott decides to limp his way towards redemption. But facing your demons is easier said than done. “With his singular voice and unforgettable wit” (Steven Rowley, author of The Guncle), Ryan O’Connell presents a candid, biting, and refreshingly real commentary on gay life, laugh-out-loud exploration of self, and a rare insight into life as a person with disabilities.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Exalted -For fans of Naoise Dolan's EXCITING TIMES and Beth Morgan's A TOUCH OF JEN -Her memoir BAD LAWYER published in 2021 by Hachette -EXALTED taps into the millennial obsession with astrology and instagram influencer culture -Hollywood and pop culture references make this very accessible and timely -VAGABLONDE was about friendships and viral fame, the focus here is on family dynamics: Dawn wants a better relationship with her son and Emily is trying to make her parents proud
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Young Mungo A story of queer love and working-class families, Young Mungo is the brilliant second novel from the Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain Acclaimed as one of the best books of the year by NPR, Kirkus Reviews, Time, and Amazon, and named a Top 10 Book of the Year by the Washington Post, Young Mungo is a brilliantly constructed and deeply moving story of queer love and working-class families by the Booker Prize–winning author of Shuggie Bain. Growing up in a housing estate in Glasgow, Mungo and James are born under different stars—Mungo a Protestant and James a Catholic—and they should be sworn enemies. Yet against all odds, they fall in love as they find sanctuary and dream of escape in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. But when Mungo’s mother sends him on a fishing trip to a remote loch with two strange men, he will need all his strength and courage to find his way back to a place where he and James might still have a future.
Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5
Expert recommendations
The best books by trans and non-binary authors View 26 titlesCurated by Ashley McDonnell
The best books by trans and non-binary authors
#OwnVoices stories on the intersection of gender, sexuality, class, and race.
Must-read sapphic novels View 26 titlesCurated by Scribd Editors
Must-read sapphic novels
Rom-coms, sci-fi and fantasy romps, and literary fiction where women love women.
Recent Lambda Literary Award Winners View 8 titlesCurated by Scribd Editors
Recent Lambda Literary Award Winners
LGBTQ centric novels, essays, and poems, all recognized for excellence in 2022.
Our Community’s Favorite LGBTQIA+ Works View 7 titlesCurated by Scribd Editors
Our Community’s Favorite LGBTQIA+ Works
Some of the most lauded and beloved queer stories.
Memoirs and Novels by Queer Authors of Color View 30 titlesCurated by Scribd Editors
Memoirs and Novels by Queer Authors of Color
Tales of joy and heartbreak from some leading LGBTQ+ writers.
There’s more to discover in LGBTQIA+ Fiction
In His Sights Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPolitics of Love Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5Enchanted to Death: A Jamie Brodie Mystery Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Man Who Lost His Pen Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsWe Go Around In The Night And Are Consumed By Fire Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Defense Of An Other Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Pirate Captain Tharkia: Tharkia Tetralogy Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsEctopia Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsQueer Life, Queer Love Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsHawthorne Manor Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe New Life: A Novel Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Scar City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsChildren of the Sun Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Fae and Moon Bound Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsThe Memory Librarian: And Other Stories of Dirty Computer Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5The Remarkable Retirement of Edna Fisher Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Stones Stay Silent Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsAny Other City Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsPomegranate: A Novel Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratingsDeath by Silver Rating: 0 out of 5 stars0 ratings