Our Queer book club reading list for 2016
The Queer Book Club returns to Readings St Kilda this year! This book club is dedicated to fiction and select non-fiction books that represent aspects of LGBTIQ life.
Here, book club convener Amy Vuleta shares the club’s very ambitious reading list for 2016…
A Place Called Winter by Patrick Gale
A privileged elder son, and stammeringly shy, Harry Cane has followed convention at every step. Even the beginnings of an illicit, dangerous affair do little to shake the foundations of his muted existence – until the shock of discovery and the threat of arrest cost him everything. Forced to abandon his wife and child, Harry signs up for emigration to the newly colonised Canadian prairies.
Blue is the Warmest Color by Julie Maroh
Clementine is a junior in high school who seems ‘normal’ enough: she has friends, family and even a boyfriend. When her openly gay best friend takes her to a gay bar, she becomes captivated by Emma, a punkish, confident girl with blue hair, an event that leads Clementine to discover new aspects of herself, both passionate and tragic.
Where the Trees Were by Inga Simpson
When Jay and her friends come across a collected of carved trees as children, the discover forges a bond between them, and opens their eyes to a wider world. But their attempt to protect the grove ends in disaster, and that one day on the river changes their lives forever. Seventeen years later, Jay finally has her chance to make amends. But at what cost?
Trumpet by Jackie Kay
The death of legendary jazz trumpeter Joss Moody exposes an extraordinary secret. Unbeknown to all but his wife Millie, Joss was a woman living as a man. The discovery is most devastating for their adopted son, Colman, whose bewildered fury brings the press to the doorstep and sends his grieving mother to the sanctuary of a remote Scottish village.
What Belongs to You by Garth Greenwell
On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher walks down a staircase beneath Sofia’s National Palace of Culture, looking for sex. Among the stalls of a public bathroom he encounters Mitko, a charismatic young hustler. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, and their trysts grow increasingly intimate and unnerving as the enigma of this young man becomes inseparable from that of his homeland, Bulgaria.
The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson
An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family Maggie Nelson’s The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of ‘autotheory’ offering fresh, fierce and timely thinking about desire, identity and the limitations and possibilities of love and language. At its center is a romance: the story of the author’s relationship with the artist Harry Dodge.
The Talented Mr Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Tom Ripley is struggling to stay one step ahead of his creditors and the law, when an unexpected acquaintance offers him a free trip to Europe and a chance to start over. Ripley wants money, success and the good life and he’s willing to kill for it. When his new-found happiness is threatened, his response is as swift as it is shocking.
Captive Prince Trilogy by C.S. Pacat
Damen is a warrior hero to his people, and the rightful heir to the throne of Akielos, but when his half brother seizes power, Damen is captured, stripped of his identity, and sent to serve the prince of an enemy nation as a pleasure slave. Beautiful, manipulative and deadly, his new master Prince Laurent epitomizes the worst of the court at Vere. But in the lethal political web of the Veretian court, nothing is as it seems, and when Damen finds himself caught up in a play for the throne, he must work together with Laurent to survive and save his country.
