20 Must-Read Under the Radar Queer Books from the First Half of 2022

These stories, often dark, are about the complicated loneliness of queer coming of age and the bright, sharp joy of finding places and people to belong to. Conklin’s characters include kids and teenagers who have survived abuse, a queer couple trying to get pregnant, lovers navigating pandemic hookups, and trans people in many stages of self-discovery. It’s refreshing to read stories about these flawed and messy queers, characters who make mistakes and unhealthy choices, who are not good, or easy, or simple.

There is nothing I can write about this book that will capture the whole of it. It is a piece of surreal and beautiful art that defines categorization and explanation. In June of 2016, a massive volcano begins growing in Central Park. From there, a disjointed but beautifully symphonic narrative emerges, as characters all over the world begin to experience strange events. Somehow, in writing about giant bugs and time travel and weird escape rooms and magical bees, Stintzi has hit on some essential truth about what it feels like to be a human on this bizarre, heartbreaking, ever-changing, impossible planet.

This is the queer family saga to end all family sagas. It’s bighearted and alive, full of characters so detailed in their histories and desires, their choices and regrets and talents, that it seems almost unbelievable that they aren’t real. It unfolds over several decades, in the POVs of seven people who make up a multiracial, multigenerational, blood and chosen family who love and hurt and rage and forgive each other. It’s about silence and homophobia and art, about the consequences of secrets and the pain of starting over, about queer joy and queer family-making, and the messy intersections of racial, cultural, biological, and familial lineage.

Andrés is a gay Latine professor who returns to his suburban hometown to help care for his aging parents and attends his 20th high school reunion, where he encounters his past, and, most poignantly, his own changed and changing understanding of himself and the place(s) he comes from. Fans of funny, voice-driven novels, rejoice! This is a scathing critique of white America and the so-called American Dream, a richly textured portrait of ordinary queer life, a middle-aged love story, a moving family drama, and one of the best portrayals of suburban life — in all its violence, absurdity, and contradiction — I’ve ever read.

There aren’t enough books about queer friendship in the world, which makes this funny and heartfelt novel about three Black gay friends in Detroit even more of a joy. Dom, Troy, and Remy are all in different places in life, and dealing with different challenges. But as they muddle their way through career messes and family drama, disastrous hookups and flailing relationships, they find they can always count on each other.

I don’t know what we’ve done to receive so many brilliant queer family dramas this year, but I am not complaining. This historical is a portrait of a queer family — its formation and splintering and coming back together — over 40 tumultuous years. It beings in Vienna in 1910, as twenty-something couple Eve and Julia begin a new life together in a new city. They find family with the other tenants of their apartment building, and, over decades, weather betrayal and heartache and the terror of war, big mistakes and little joys, and the consequences of impossible choices.

Cho Norie is a twenty-something gay Taiwanese woman living in Japan and working an office job. She’s not only keeping her sexuality hidden, but also the traumatic events that led her to move to Japan in the first place. This queer coming-of-age novel explores the tensions between living openly and the relative safety of closet. It’s also a moving story about contemporary queer life in Japan and Taiwan, workplace culture, and healing from trauma.

This novel, told in a collection of linked stories, feels like a living ode to the city of Lagos and the queer and trans people who live on its margins. It’s not a simple or a straightforward book, and it doesn’t adhere to linear storytelling norms and conventions. It’s vivid and meandering, sometimes funny and sometimes painful, a kaleidoscope of lives and places and moments.

Putsata Reang was only a baby when her family fled Cambodia. They spent weeks on a boat, and when Reang appeared lifeless and sick, the captain urged her mother to throw her overboard. Instead, her mother protected her and eventually made sure she got medical care. In this memoir, Reang explores the impact this story and this debt has had on her life, as she’s tried to make her mother proud while also living her own life as a queer woman. It’s a thoughtful, challenging, beautiful book about a complicated mother-daughter relationship and about the often hidden weights that immigrants and refugees carry.

Queer essay collections are having a really great year! In this collection, Raquel Gutiérrez writes about place, terrain, architecture, and landscape — the physical landscapes of the Southwest, the emotional landscapes of queer culture and history, and the complicated ways that these borders intersect in her own life as a queer brown woman and artist.

Tran’s poetry has a kind of inner momentum that pulls you along; once you start reading it, it is almost impossible to stop. These visceral poems are sometimes devastating, but they are also playful at times, resilient and defiant. They are about surviving sexual violence and generational trauma, about the costs of U.S. imperialism and the violence done against bodies that do not conform. But they are also about softness and art and the beauty of creating new languages of self, desire, and possibility.

What does it mean to belong somewhere? What does it mean to love a place and leave it? How do the places we come from, and the places our parents come from, and the places we chose for ourselves, affect our understanding of who we are? Avashia delves into these questions and more in this wonderful collection of essays about being queer and Indian and Appalachian. She writes about the Indian aunties she grew up with and the history of the chemical industry in West Virginia, gun violence and racism, Indian and Appalachian food, immigration and assimilation.

In her early twenties, after moving to St. Louis with her partner, Montesanti joins roller derby, hoping to build a queer community in her new city. She does find community — and unconditional friendship — but roller derby also forces her to confront the trauma of her childhood, her disordered eating, and her relationship with her emotionally abusive mother in more direct ways than she’s ever done before. This is a gutting but hopeful memoir about physical and emotional pain, the work of healing, the magic of friendship, and, of course, roller derby.

It’s hard to describe this beautiful and haunting book of hybrid nonfiction. If you enjoy books that blur the lines of genres and refuse to sit neatly in one place, this one is for you. Using a variety of forms, including lists, passages from from the work of other philosophers and writers, and seemingly-straightforward lyric essays, Horn explores language and its loss, transness and desire, living in a body that changes, translation, art, illness, the ocean, history. They slide easily between ideas and between memory and myth. It’s a slippery surprise of a book that will linger long after you finish it.