Best queer books I read in 2024
Books! They're queer now
Sometimes when I’m scrolling on social media, as I do, I come across creators or users who start a video by saying “I read 100 books this year”, or “All the books I read this month”, and it’s something diabolical like seventeen, and they’re all more than 700 pages long. And then I’ll end up thinking to myself, wow, I really am a terrible reader, for someone who thinks of themselves as a reader, anyway. I only read X amount of books this year, and it’s already December. Phoney.
I’m sure this is a familiar feeling to all you readers out there. But fear not. I’m here to tell you that actually, I’ve decided that the numbers don’t matter. What reading is about is the quality, not the quantity. It’s about what the books made you feel, who the characters reminded you of, what niche micro-obsession they sparked. And once you realise that, no one on the internet who supposedly read 100 books this year is allowed to make you feel bad about yourself.
In the interest of this novel (ha) metric, this “quality”, I’ve compiled a list of what I would describe as the best queer and queer-leaning books I read in 2024 (and a few I read before that, in the interest of transparency).
Go forth and read, readers. And remember, it’s not a race.
The Rachel Incident – Caroline O’Donoghue
Rachel and her best friend James live together in County Cork, Ireland. Though they have many things in common (a love of reality tv, cheap alcohol), at the top of the list sits an unearthly, very much not platonic, obsession with Rachel’s university professor Dr Fred Byrne.
Possibly one of the most beautiful, honest and particular friendships ever written, The Rachel Incident is unflinching in its painting of longing, morality and infatuation in your early 20s.
Buy it here.
Holding The Man – Timothy Conigrave
We’re in 1970s Melbourne, and Tim has a crush on the captain of the Xavier College football team. Not one to push his desires to one side, Tim follows his heart, and a twenty-year-long love-affair with John begins.
A beautifully constructed work of autofiction, Holding the Man carves into sharp relief a vision of Melbourne in the 70s and 80s, of the secrets queer men had to keep to survive, of the families that ripped apart and of the love that knitted chosen family together.
Buy it here.
Green Dot – Madeleine Gray
Hera is lost in the sea of her mid-twenties. Her friends are more successful than her, she still lives at home, and no one seems to understand the deep and intelligent irony of her Rupi Kaur jokes. In the grey and corporate office she works in to pass the time, things are no better. Until she meets Arthur. Arthur is funny, warm, and great in bed. Arthur is also married. Hera is at once in love and drowning in anxiety, guilt and denial.
Green Dot expertly encapsulates the modern anxiety of relationships and the internet. What happens to your mind when you’re chasing something you can’t have, knowing that it’s not good for you?
Buy it here.
Big Swiss – Jen Beagin
Greta’s life is one-note: she is forty-five, recently divorced, and new in a tiny town. She lives with her Jack Russell (whom she won in the divorce), her strange housemate Sabine and, naturally, a large colony of bees. One-note, that is, until she meets Big Swiss. On order to get closer to Big Swiss, real name Flavia, Greta finds herself living a double life of her own creation, and having to uphold it is becoming increasingly difficult.
Big Swiss is bizarrely wonderful book. Beagin’s world is rich with the kinds of details that would ordinarily bog a story down, but here they augment her characters, her settings, their realities. The longer you read the deeper you will sink into the story Greta and Flavia write for themselves. How much does the truth really matter?
Buy it here.
Briefly, a Delicious Life – Nell Stevens
Blanca, fourteen, spends her days bored, haunting the Mallorcan convent in which she died in the 1500s. Monks, renters, and landlords move in and out over the centuries, weaving and compressing time together. That is, until George Sand, with her peculiar manly clothes and her cigars, takes up residence in one of the small cells on the edge of the convent with her lover, Chopin, and her two children. Blanca’s obsession with George intensifies, becomes otherworldly, and the spools of her own life, and death, begin to unravel.
Briefly, a Delicious Life is a sublimely written queer ghost story. Stevens manages to skirt the delicacy of the curious teenage mind while wondering what it means to love, and to live a meaningful life, even after death.
Buy it here.
Foster Dade Explores the Cosmos – Nash Jenkins
Foster is fifteen. Immediately upon arriving at one of the most expensive and exclusive boarding schools in New York State, he is thrust into a world of unreadable power dynamics and explosive secrecy.
Jenkins explores what happens when queerness is hidden, yearned for, and locked away from prying eyes, when young men find themselves beholden to the delicate construction of so-called masculinity.
Imagine The Secret History, except set in 2010, and everyone has a Blackberry.
Buy it here.
The Bee Sting – Paul Murray
The Barnes’ are successful, and everyone knows it. There’s Dickie’s garage, the biggest in town, there’s Imelda, the glamourous housewife, and Cass and PJ, who will be fine, because the kids are always fine. But, as is so often the case, all is not as it seems. The garage is haemorrhaging money, Imelda is trapped in the tragedies of the past, Cass is hopelessly in love with her best friend Elaine, and PJ is stuck in the middle of it all, treading water. Secrets smoulder, lies pile up and affairs bubble below the surface, threatening to rip everything apart.
A family chronicle of epic proportions, The Bee Sting examines the lengths that people will go to protect themselves, their families, and what they hold dear.
Buy it here.
Lead Us Not – Abbey Lay
When Olive, a girl from Millie’s year twelve class, moves in next door, Millie is immediately transfixed. Between their second-storey bedroom windows a friendship blossoms, and soon nothing is more important to Millie than what Olive is doing, when Olive will call, what Olive’s plans are for the future and whether they will involve her.
Parties, family tensions, boys, and the unspoken rules of female friendship and desire work their way between the girls, weaving an intricate web that neither of them seem to be able to escape.
Lead Us Not so accurately portrays the chaotic shorebreak of late adolescence and high school that I almost felt eighteen again.
Buy it here.
Devotion – Hannah Kent
Hanne’s family is emigrating to Australia. It’s Prussia (modern day Germany) in the 1800s, and religious persecution has pushed them onto a heaving ship, and everything they’ve ever known - their home, their community, their congregation - fades into the distance. But Hanne is not alone. She has Thea.
Kent’s prose is lyrical, soft; it lulls you into a sense of security and then drops you off the edge of a cliff. This might be, if I may be so bold, the best queer historical novel I’ve ever read.
Buy it here.
Penance – Eliza Clark
After midnight in a sleepy beach town in the UK, a teenage girl is lit on fire in a beach box by the girls she once called friends. How did they arrive at this juncture? Who scorned who, and who is to blame?
Tumblr, fan culture, true crime, and the guile and devastating subtlety of teenage bullying combine to form a tangle seemingly impossible to unravel.
Buy it here.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post – Emily M. Danforth
It’s the nineties, and after being caught with her best friend Coley, teenaged Cameron Post is sent off by her aunt to a secluded religious conversion camp in the northern United States. All contact with the outside world, including with Coley, is forbidden. Miserable and consumed by betrayal, Cameron resists the routines of the therapy. But she finds herself amongst an unlikely group of friends, all doing their best under the circumstances, and she finds herself forming bonds that rival her connection to home, to Coley and to her family.
Cameron Post is a fresh and intimate story, adorned by dusty carpets, sun-bleached timber, compulsory gospel karaoke and the fresh mountain air of upstate Montana. Danforth’s writing is as devastating as it is hopeful.
Buy it here.
Julia is a writer living in Melbourne, Australia. She spends a lot of time in her local bookstore, plucking her eyebrows, and putting stickers on things.
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My best queer book was honestly the song of achilles . I cried so HARDDD