Uplifting queer fiction
If you're looking for a reprieve from queer stories that end in tragedy, look no further. Here's a selection of titles with a diverse array of LGBTQIA+ characters, telling a wide array of stories, that will all leave you feeling a bit more hopeful than when you started.
The Performance by Claire Thomas
The house lights lower.
The auditorium feels hopeful in the darkness.
As bushfires rage outside the city, three women watch a performance of a Beckett play.
Margot is a successful professor, preoccupied by her fraught relationship with her ailing husband. Ivy is a philanthropist with a troubled past, distracted by the snoring man beside her. Summer is a young theatre usher, anxious about the safety of her girlfriend in the fire zone. As the performance unfolds, so does each woman’s story. By the time the curtain falls, they will all have a new understanding of the world beyond the stage.
It’s Been A Pleasure, Noni Blake by Claire Christian
Noni didn’t expect to be starting over again at the age of thirty-six. But eighteen months after the end of her long-term relationship, she knows it’s time to find out what’s next.
While an encounter with a sexy blonde firefighter is a welcome entry back into the dating world, Noni soon realises she’s looking for more than just a series of brief, unsatisfying encounters. That’s how she finds herself leaving her job in Australia and travelling to Europe, with a resolution to find pleasure wherever she can, whenever she wants it.
A quirky, feel-good comedy about creating the life you want.
Mrs S by K. Patrick
In an elite English boarding school, a young Australian woman arrives to take up the antiquated role of ‘matron’.
Within this landscape of immense privilege, in which the girls can sense the slightest weakness in those around them, she finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body. That is until she meets Mrs S, the headmaster’s wife, a woman who is her polar opposite: assured, sophisticated, a paragon of femininity.
Over the course of a long, restless heatwave, the matron finds herself irresistibly drawn ever closer into Mrs S’s world and their unspoken desire blooms into an illicit affair of electric intensity.
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?
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
Originally serialised in a San Francisco newspaper in the 1970s, Armistead Maupin's Tales of the City afforded a mainstream audience of millions its first exposure to straight and gay characters experiencing the follies of urban life on equal terms.
Hurdling barriers both social and sexual, Maupin leads a rag-tag ensemble cast through heartbreak and triumph, creating a glittering and addictive comedy of manners that continues to beguile new generations of readers.
With ten books in the series, the most recent of which came out just last year, you can follow the joys and tribulations of the characters across the decades.
Small Joys by Elvin James Mensah
Harley is a young, queer Black man, struggling to find his way in mid-noughties Britain. Returning home after dropping out of an undergraduate course in music journalism, he is wracked by feelings of failure and inadequacy. Standing in the local woods one day, on the verge of doing something drastic and irreversible, his hand is stayed by a stranger: Muddy, an ebullient Mancunian whose lust for his own life makes others feel better by association.
Muddy quickly becomes a devoted and loyal friend to Harley, who finds his enthusiasm infectious and his dimples irresistible. In no time at all, they become inseparable. Harley starts to think that life may be worth living after all, while Muddy discovers things about himself that the lads down the rugby club may struggle to understand. Moving, funny and tender, Small Joys is an epic novel about ordinary lives.
Interesting Facts About Space by Emily Austin
Enid is many things: lesbian, serial dater, deaf in one ear, space obsessive, true crime fanatic. When she's not listening to grizzly murder podcasts, she's managing her crippling phobia of bald people and trying hard not to think about her mortifying teenage years. She's worried about herself, her depressive mother, and what the deal is with gender reveal parties. But as Enid fumbles her way through her first serious relationship and navigates a new family life with her estranged half-sisters, she starts to worry that someone is following her. As her paranoia spirals out of control, Enid must contend with her mounting suspicion that something is seriously wrong with her...
Full of charm, humour and heart, Interesting Facts About Space is a pitch-perfect exploration of the strange ways we try to connect with others, and the power of sharing our secret selves with the people we love.
Big Girl by Mecca Jamila Sullivan
Growing up in rapidly gentrifying 90s Harlem, Malaya struggles to fit into a world that makes no room for her. She's funny, creative and smart, but all people see – even those who love her – is her size. At eight, her mother takes her to Weight Watchers; at twelve, her parents fear she'll be taken from them; by sixteen, a gastric bypass is discussed.
On good days, Malaya braids bright colours into her hair, turns up Biggie Smalls on her Walkman, and strides through Harlem, his words galvanising her; on bad days, she doesn't leave her bed other than for furtive trips for the forbidden food that will comfort her – for a while.
Compelling and compassionate, Big Girl is an unforgettable portrait of a queer Black girl as she learns to take up space in the world on her own terms.
Greta and Valdin by Rebecca K Reilly
Siblings Greta and Valdin have, perhaps, too much in common. They're flatmates, beholden to the same near-unpronounceable surname, and both make questionable choices when it comes to love. Valdin is in love with his ex-boyfriend Xabi, who left the country because he thought he was making Valdin sad. Greta is in love with fellow English tutor Holly, who appears to be using her for admin support. But perhaps all is not lost; Valdin is coming to realize that he might not be so unlovable, and Greta, that she might be worth more than the papers she can mark.
Helping the siblings navigate queerness, multiracial identity, and the tendency of their love interests to flee, is the Vladisavljevic family – Maori-Russian-Catalonian, and as passionate as they are eccentric. Rebecca K Reilly's exploration of love, family, karaoke, and the generational reverberations of colonialism will make you laugh, cry, and fall for the whole Vladisavljevic bunch.
This Love by Lotte Jeffs
When Mae and Ari meet their final year at the University of Leeds, their connection is magnetic. Mae, whilst stubborn and no stranger to breaking hearts, needs Ari's bright light to guide her out of her self-centred ways; Ari, vibrant, charming and reeling in the aftermath of a scandal in New York, clings to Mae as his grounding anchor.
As the years sweep by, the two traverse the tumult of life: toxic partners and hidden secrets, the heavy weight of grief, and a complicated, unignorable desire to start a family . . . If they can hold onto one another in the face of the relentless past and the inevitable future, they might discover how to build something beautiful out of their expansive, boundary-breaking love. Spanning ten years of extraordinary friendship, This Love is a vivid and epic tale of finding your soulmates, building an unconventional family, and the limitless, ever-changing forms love can take.
The Happy Couple by Naoise Dolan
Meet Celine and Luke. To all intents and purposes, the happy couple.
But Celine's more interested in playing the piano, and Luke's a serial cheater.
As their big day approaches, the complicated lives of the wedding party begin to unravel. The best man, Archie, still hasn't moved on from his love for Luke. The bridesmaid, Phoebe, has no long-term aspirations beyond getting to the bottom of Luke's frequent, unexplained disappearances. Then there's the guest, Vivian, who with the benefit of some emotional distance, methodically observes her friends like ants.
As the wedding approaches and these five lives intersect, each character will find themselves looking for a path to their happily ever after – but does it lie at the end of an aisle?
Rosewater by Liv Little
Elsie is out of options.
Deflated by debt and faced with the dark reality of having bailiffs show up at her door, Elsie has nowhere to go, and just one person left to turn to: her once best friend, Juliet.
As Elsie tries to breathe through panic attacks, and remain steady on already fragile foundations, she finds friendship and sanctuary in Juliet’s flat. But she's still spiraling, struggling to turn her poetry into a career, unable to decide whether she wants more than hookups with her hot and spirited co-worker, Bea, and desperate to get her life back on track.
Sometimes what you’ve been searching for has been there all along. Can Elsie see it in time?
Are you looking to celebrate Pride Month with the frothiest and happiest books possible? Then as well as these literary fiction picks, check out our curated collection of queer romances – guaranted to have a happy ending!
