2022 LGBTQIA+ fiction favourites
It’s been a fantastic year for LGBTQIA+ stories in fiction. Below, you’ll find some of our 2022 fiction favourites that centre and celebrate a multiplicity of LGBTQIA+ experiences within their pages.
The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach
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.
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, resurrected by an ancient power, she wakes up ...
All This Could Be Different by Sarah Thankam Mathews
Sneha is a recent college graduate freshly arrived in Milwaukee, she occupies her days with stressful work as a consultant for a battery production corporation. Her nights are spent ordering furniture off the internet, trying out the newfangled invention of dating apps, and avoiding confrontation with her property manager. But the rewards are bountiful: the vertigo of young life in a new and expanding city, a budding friendship with the charismatic Tig, a quiet obsession with ballet dancer Marina, and the ability to send money by wire transfer to her parents in India.
Piece by piece she gathers and nurtures the fragments of a good life. But then the walls start to creep in…
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Miri thinks she has got her wife back, when Leah finally returns after a deep sea mission that ended in catastrophe. It soon becomes clear, though, that Leah may have come back wrong. Whatever happened in that vessel, whatever it was they were supposed to be studying before they were stranded on the ocean floor, Leah has carried part of it with her, onto dry land and into their home.
To have the woman she loves back should mean a return to normal life, but Miri can feel Leah slipping from her grasp. Memories of what they had before – the jokes they shared, the films they watched, all the small things that made Leah hers – only remind Miri of what she stands to lose.
Nevada by Imogen Binnie (reissue)
Maria, a trans woman in her thirties, is going nowhere. She spends her aimless days working in a New York bookstore, trying to remain true to a punk ethos while drinking herself into a stupor and having a variety of listless and confusing sexual encounters.
After her girlfriend cheats on her, Maria steals her car and heads for the Pacific, embarking on her version of the Great American Road Trip. Along the way she stops in Reno, Nevada, and meets James, a young man who works in the local Wal-Mart. Maria recognises elements of her younger self in James and the pair quickly form an unlikely but powerful connection, one that will have big implications for them both.
Happy Stories, Mostly by Norman Erikson Pasaribu
Happy Stories, Mostly is a playful, charged and tender collection of twelve stories – a blend of speculative fiction and dark absurdism, often drawing on Norman Erikson Pasaribu’s Batak and Christian cultures. Pasaribu’s stories ask what it means to be almost happy – almost to find joy, almost to be accepted, but never quite grasp one’s desire. Joy and contentment shimmer on the horizon, just out of reach.
Throughout the collection, queerness is a fact of life from which tragicomic events spring, amidst the forces that keep people from those whom they yearn for most, and the miraculous, melancholy ability to survive such loneliness.
Son of Sin by Omar Sakr
An estranged father. An abused and abusive mother. An army of relatives. A tapestry of violence, woven across generations and geographies, from Turkey to Lebanon to Western Sydney. This is the legacy left to Jamal Smith, a young queer Muslim trying to escape a past in which memory and rumour trace ugly shapes in the dark.
When every thread in life constricts instead of connects, how do you find a way to breathe? Torn between faith and fear, gossip and gospel, family and friendship, Jamal must find and test the limits of love.
Gods of Want by K-Ming Chang
K-Ming Chang’s storytelling is fierce, fabulist and feminist. In these uncanny tales, she delves into myth and memory, corporeality and ghostliness, queerness and the quotidian, with boundless imagination.
In ‘Auntland’, a stream of aunts adjust to American life by sneaking kisses from women at temple and buying tubs of vanilla ice cream to prep for citizenship tests. In ‘The Chorus of Dead Cousins’, ghost cousins cross space, seas and skies to haunt their living cousin. In ‘Xif ’, a mother-in-law tortures a wife in increasingly unsuccessful attempts to oust her. In ‘Mariela’, two girls explore each other’s bodies for the first time in the belly of a plastic shark.
Marlo by Jay Carmichael
It’s the 1950s in conservative Australia, and Christopher, a young gay man, moves to ‘the City’ to escape the repressive atmosphere of his tiny hometown. Once there, however, he finds that it is just as censorial and punitive, in its own way.
Then Christopher meets Morgan, and the two fall in love – a love that breathes truth back into Christopher’s stifled life. But the society around them remains rigid and unchanging, and what begins as a refuge for both men inevitably buckles under the intensity of navigating a world that wants them to refuse what they are. Will their devotion be enough to keep them together?
Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart
Born under different stars, Protestant Mungo and Catholic James live in the hyper-masculine and violently sectarian world of Glasgow’s housing estates. They should be sworn enemies if they’re to be seen as men at all, and yet they become best friends as they find a sanctuary in the pigeon dovecote that James has built for his prize racing birds. As they find themselves falling in love, they dream of escaping the grey city, and Mungo works especially hard to hide his true self from all those around him, especially from his elder brother Hamish, a local gang leader with a brutal reputation to uphold.
But the threat of discovery is constant and the punishment unspeakable ...
Yerba Buena by Nina LaCour
When Sara Foster runs away at sixteen, she leaves behind the girl she once was, capable of trust and intimacy. Years later, in Los Angeles, she is a sought-after bartender, renowned as much for her brilliant cocktails as for the mystery that clings to her.
Across the city, Emilie Dubois is in her seventh year and fifth major as an undergraduate, she yearns for the beauty and community her Creole grandparents cultivated but is unable to commit. On a whim, she takes a job arranging flowers at the glamorous restaurant Yerba Buena and embarks on an affair with the married owner. When Sara catches sight of Emilie one morning at Yerba Buena, their connection is immediate. But the damage both women carry, and the choices they have made, will pull them apart again and again.
After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz
It’s 1895. Amid laundry and bruises, Rina Pierangeli Faccio gives birth to the child of the man who raped her – the man she has been forced to marry. Unbroken, she determines to change her name and, alongside it, her life. Now 1902. Romaine Brooks sails for Capri. She has barely enough money for the ferry, nothing for lunch; her paintbrushes are bald and clotted. But she is sure she can sell a painting. In 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: I want to make life fuller – and fuller.
Told in a series of cascading vignettes, featuring a multitude of voices, After Sappho reimagines the lives of a brilliant group of feminists, sapphists, artists and writers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
28 Questions by Indyana Schneider
When first-year music student Amalia stumbles into her Oxford college bar, she has no idea that everything is about to change. Seated across from her is Alex, a velvety-voiced fellow Australian with eyes the colour of her native sky. They strike up a friendship that is immediate – its intensity both thrilling and terrifying.
As the days and weeks go by, they spend more and more time together: philosophising, hypothesising, questioning everything. There is nothing they cannot talk about, except the one thing that matters most. Dare they risk a romantic entanglement if it threatens this most perfect of friendships?
Greenland by David Santos-Donaldson
In 1919, Mohammed el Adl, the young Egyptian lover of British author E. M. Forster, spent six months in a jail cell. A century later, Kip Starling has locked himself in his Brooklyn basement study with a pistol and twenty-one gallons of Poland Spring to write Mohammed’s story.
Kip has only three weeks until his publisher’s deadline to immerse himself in the mind of Mohammed who, like Kip, is Black, queer, an Other. As Kip immerses himself in his writing, Mohammed’s story – and then Mohammed himself – begins to speak to him, and his life becomes a Proustian portal into Kip’s own memories and psyche.
Men I Trust by Tommi Parrish (graphic novel)
Tommi Parrish’s sophomore graphic novel establishes them as one of the most exciting voices in contemporary literature.
Eliza is a thirtysomething struggling single mother and poet. Sasha, a twentysomething yearning for direction in life, just moved back in with her parents and dabbles as a sex worker. The two strike up an unlikely friendship that, as it veers towards something more, becomes a deeply resonant exploration of how far people are willing to go to find intimacy in a society that is increasingly closed off.
Seeing Other People by Diana Reid
After two years of lockdowns, there’s change in the air. Eleanor has just broken up with her boyfriend, Charlie’s career as an actress is starting up again. They’re finally ready to pursue their dreams – relationships, career, family – if only they can work out what it is they really want.
When principles and desires clash, Eleanor and Charlie are forced to ask: where is the line between self-love and selfishness? In all their confusion, mistakes will be made and lies will be told as they reckon with the limits of their own self-awareness.
Less is Lost by Andrew Sean Greer
For Arthur Less, life is going surprisingly well: he is a moderately accomplished novelist in a steady relationship with his partner, Freddy Pelu. But nothing lasts: the death of an old lover and a sudden financial crisis has Less running away from his problems yet again as he accepts a series of literary gigs that send him on a zigzagging adventure across the US.
Less roves across the 'Mild Mild West', through the South and to his mid-Atlantic birthplace, with an ever-changing posse of writerly characters and his trusty duo – a human-like black pug, Dolly, and a rusty camper van nicknamed Rosina. He grows a handlebar mustache, ditches his signature gray suit, and disguises himself in the bolero-and-cowboy-hat costume of a true 'Unitedstatesian'… with varying levels of success, as he continues to be mistaken for either a Dutchman, the wrong writer, or, worst of all, a 'bad gay.' We cannot, however, escape ourselves – even across deserts, bayous, and coastlines.