There’s so much more to love than sex and romance. There’s also far more to sex and romance than their often pervasive white, cis, straight heteronormative definitions. This Valentine’s Day, we’re recommending books that challenge these narrow definitions about how we love.

Thankfully, our shelves are full of voices that both smartly and eloquently explore questions around love, sex, and the self. Below are some favourite reads from recent times, or browse the full collection of suggested titles here.

Sarahland by Sam Cohen

In this collection, Cohen explodes the search for self, insisting that we have more to resist and repair than our own personal narratives. Readers witness as the ever-evolving Sarah gets recast: as a bible-era trans woman, an aging lesbian literally growing roots, a being who transcends the earth as we know it. In each Sarah’s refusal to adhere to a single narrative, she potentially builds a better home for us all.

Kink edited by R.O. Kwonm & Garth Greenwell

Kink is a dynamic anthology of literary fiction that opens an imaginative door into the world of desire. The stories within this collection portray love, desire, BDSM, and sexual kinks in all their glory with a bold new vision. While there are whips and chains, sure, the true power of these stories lies in their beautiful, moving dispatches from across the sexual spectrum of interest and desires, as portrayed by some of today’s most exciting writers.

As Beautiful As Any Other by Kaya Wilson

When Kaya Wilson came out to his parents as transgender, a year after a near-death surfing accident and just weeks before his father’s death, he was met with a startling family history of concealed queerness and shame. As Beautiful As Any Other weaves this legacy together with intimate examinations of the forces that have shaped Wilson’s life, and his body: vulnerability and power, grief and trauma, science and narrative.

In this powerful and lyrical memoir, Wilson makes a case for the strength we find when we confront the complexities of our identity with compassion.

My Year of Living Vulnerably by Rick Morton

In early 2019, Rick Morton was diagnosed with complex post-traumatic stress disorder - which, as he says, is just a fancy way of saying that one of the people who should have loved him the most during childhood didn’t.

So, over the course of twelve months, he went on a journey to rediscover love. To get better. Not cured, not fixed. Just, better. This is a book about his journey to betterness, his year of living vulnerably. It’s a book about love. What love is, how we see it, what forms it takes, how we practice it in our lives, what it means to us, and how we really, really can’t live without it, even if, like Rick for many years, we think we can.

A Room Called Earth by Madeleine Ryan

A young woman gets ready to go to a party. She arrives, feels overwhelmed, leaves, and then returns. Minutely attuned to the people who come into her view, and alternating between alienation and profound connection, she is hilarious, self-aware, sometimes acerbic, and painfully honest.

And by the end of the night, she’s shown us something radical about love, loss, and the need to belong.

How We Love by Clementine Ford

Clementine Ford is a person who has loved deeply, strangely and with curiosity. She is fascinated by love and the multiple ways it makes its home in our hearts and believes that the way we continue to surrender ourselves to love is an act of great faith and bravery. This tender and lyrical memoir explores love in its many forms, through Clementine’s own experiences. With clear eyes and an open heart, she writes about losing her adored mother far too young, about the pain and confusion of first love - both platonic and romantic - and the joy and heartache of adult love.

Late Bloomer by Clem Bastow

Introducing a bold new voice in Australian nonfiction, Late Bloomer is a heartfelt coming-of-age memoir that will change the way you think about autism.

Clem Bastow grew up feeling like she’d missed a key memo on human behaviour. She found the unspoken rules of social engagement confusing, arbitrary and often stressful. Friendships were hard, relationships harder, and the office was a fluorescent-lit nightmare of anxiety. It wasn’t until Clem was diagnosed as autistic, at age 36, that things clicked into focus.

A History of My Brief Body by Billy-Ray Belcourt

Billy-Ray Belcourt’s collection of personal essays opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile Cree Nation. From there, it expands to encompass the big and broken world around him, in all its complexity and contradictions: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it, first loves and first loves lost, sexual exploration and intimacy, and the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward.