Cool Gay Lit
Discover the ultimate curated list of cool gay literature, featuring iconic authors like Armistead Maupin, Alan Hollinghurst, and Michael Cunningham. From the beloved Tales of the City series to modern classics like The Line of Beauty and The Hours, this collection spans compelling fiction, drama, and unforgettable storytelling. Dive into a world of rich narratives and diverse LGBTQ+ voices—perfect for book lovers seeking must-read, critically acclaimed titles. Explore the best in gay fiction and add these timeless gems to your reading list.
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Michael Tolliver Lives
by Armistead Maupin
Having survived the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers, Michael has learned to embrace the random pleasures of life, the tender alliances that sustain him in the hardest of times.
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50 Reasons to Say Goodbye - A Novel
by Nick Alexander
Mark is looking for love in all the wrong places. He always ignores the warning signs preferring to dream, time and again, that he has met the perfect lover until, one day, finally he does... Through fifty different adventures, Nick Alexander takes us on a tour of modern gay society: bars, night-clubs, blind dates, internet dating...it's all here. Funny and moving by turn, 50 Reasons to Say 'Goodbye' is ultimately a series of candidly vivid snapshots and a poignant exploration of that long winding road; the universal search for love.
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Sottopassaggio - A Novel
by Nick Alexander
Following the loss of his partner in a car crash, Mark, the hero from the bestselling 50 Reasons to Say 'Goodbye', tries to pick up the pieces and build a new life for himself in gay-friendly Brighton. Haunted by the death of his lover and a fading sense of self, Mark struggles to put the past behind him, exploring Brighton's high and low life, falling in love with charming but unavailable Tom and hooking up with Jenny, a long lost girlfriend from a time when such a thing seemed possible. A novel that weaves the past to the present and the present in the future.
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Good Thing Bad Thing
by Nick Alexander
On holiday with new boyfriend Tom, Mark - the hero from the best-selling novels, 50 Reasons to Say Goodbye and Sottopassaggio - heads off to rural Italy for a spot of camping. When the ruggedly seductive Dante invites them onto his farmland the lovers think they have struck lucky, but there is more to Dante than meets the eye - much more. Racked with suspicion, it is Mark who notices as their holiday starts to spin slowly but very surely out of control - and it is Mark, alone, who can maybe save the day...
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Rough Music
by Patrick Gale
Beautifully written and deeply compassionate, Rough Music is a novel of one family at two defining points in time. Seamlessly alternating between the present day and a summer thirty years past, its twin stories unfold at a cottage along the eastern coast of England. Will Pagett receives an unexpected gift on his fortieth birthday, two weeks at a perfect beach house in Cornwall. Seeking some distance from the married man with whom he's having an affair, he invites his aging mother and father to share his holiday, knowing the sun and sea will be a welcome change for. But the cottage and the stretch of sand before it seem somehow familiar and memories of a summer long ago begin to surface. Thirty-two years earlier. A young married couple and their eight year-old son begin two idyllic weeks at a beach house in Cornwall. But the sudden arrival of unknown American relatives has devastating consequences, turning what was to be a moment of reconciliation into an act of betrayal that will cast a lengthy shadow. As Patrick Gale masterfully unspools these parallel stories, we see their subtle and surprising reflections in each other and discover how the forgotten dramas of childhood are reenacted throughout our lives. Deftly navigating the terrain between humor and tragedy, Patrick Gale has written an unforgettable novel about the lies that adults tell and the small acts of treason that children can commit. Rough Music gracefully illuminates the merciful tricks of memory and the courage with which we continue to assert our belief in love and happiness.
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Close Range
by Annie Proulx
A collection of short stories, which includes the short story, Brokeback Mountain.
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More Tales of the City
by Armistead Maupin
The tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have fled their cozy nest for adventures far afield. Mary Ann Singleton finds love at sea with a forgetful stranger, Mona Ramsey discovers her doppelgÄnger in a desert whorehouse, and Michael Tolliver bumps into his favorite gynecologist in a Mexican bar. Meanwhile, their venerable landlady takes the biggest journey of all—without ever leaving home.
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Further Tales of the City
by Armistead Maupin
The calamity-prone residents of 28 Barbary Lane are at it again in this deliciously dark novel of romance and betrayal. While Anna Madrigal imprisons an anchorwoman in her basement, Michael Tolliver looks for love at the National Gay Rodeo, DeDe Halcyon Day and Mary Ann Singleton track a charismatic psychopath across Alaska, and society columnist Prue Giroux loses her heart to a derelict living in San Francisco park.
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Babycakes
by Armistead Maupin
"An extended love letter to a magical San Francisco." --New York Times Book Review When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there's more to making a baby then meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbor, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first work of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS. "Armistead is a true original. His tales are bang up-to-date. They will surprise and maybe even shock you, but, I promise, they will make you laugh." --Ian McKellen "Maupin has a genius for observation. His characters have the timing of vaudeville comics, flawed by human frailty and fueled by blind hop." --Denver Post "Armistead Maupin's San Francisco saga careens beautifully on." -- New York Times Book Review
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The Back Passage
by James Lear
A seaside village, an English country house, a family of wealthy eccentrics and their equally peculiar servants, a determined detective - all the ingredients are here for a cozy Agatha Christie-style whodunnit. But wait - Edward `Mitch' Mitchell is no Hercule Poirot, and The Back Passage is no Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Mitch is a handsome, insatiable 22-year-old hunk who never lets a clue stand in the way of a steamy encounter, whether it's with the local constabulary, or his schoolmate and fellow athlete Boy Morgan, who becomes his Watson.
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Line of Beauty
by Alan Hollinghurst
Moving into the attic room in the Notting Hill home of the wealthy, politically connected Fedden family in 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest becomes caught up in the rising fortunes of this glamorous family and finds his own life forever altered by his association during the boom years of the 1980s. By the author of The Swimming-Pool Library. 30,000 first printing.
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The Swimming-Pool Library
by Alan Hollinghurst
The dazzling first novel from the best-selling, Booker Prize-Winning author of The Line of Beauty and The Sparsholt Affair. An enthralling, darkly erotic novel of homosexuality before the scourge of AIDS; an elegy, possessed of chilling clarity, for ways of life that can no longer be lived with impunity. The Swimming-Pool Library focuses on the friendship of two men: William Beckwith, a young gay aristocrat who leads a life of privilege and promiscuity, and Lord Nantwich, an elderly man searching for someone to write his biography and inherit his traditions.
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Corfu
by Robert Dessaix
Novel inspired by the life of little-known Australian writer Kester Berwick. Set in the Greek islands, Adelaide and London's suburbs. An Australian actor living alone in the cottage of a man he's never met pieces together the life of the writer whose house he is living in, which he begins to compare with his own. Explores themes of love, friendship, the ordinary and extraordinary, and exile and home. Author is a writer, literary commentator, translator and broadcaster, who spent 10 years as presenter of ABC Radio National's 'Books and Writing'. Previous titles include the autobiography 'A Mother's Disgrace' and novel 'Night Letters'.
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The Man Who Fell In Love With The Moon
by Tom Spanbauer
The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon is an American epic of the old West for our own times -- a novel huge in its imaginative scope and daring in its themes. The narrator is Shed, or Duivichi-un-Dua, a half-breed bisexual boy who makes his living at the Indian Head Hotel in the little turn-of-the-century town of Excellent, Idaho. The imperious Ida Richilieu is Shed's employer, the town's mayor and the mistress, and the mistress and owner of this outrageously pink whorehouse. Together with the beautiful prostitute Alma Hatch, and the philosophical, green-eyed, half-crazy cowboy Dellwood Barker, this collection of misfits and outcasts make up the core of Shed's eccentric family. And although laced with the ugliness and cruelty of the frontier West -- Shed is raped by the same man who then murders the woman he thinks is his mother, and the Mormon townspeople bring a fiery end to Ida's raucous way of life -- the love and acceptance that tie this family together provide the true heart of this novel. The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon is a beautifully told, mythic tale that is as well a profound meditation on sexualty,race and man's relationship to himself and the natural world.
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A Home at the End of the World
by Michael Cunningham
In New York after college, Bobby moves in with Jonathan and his roommate, Clare, a veteran of the city's erotic wars. Bobby and Clare fall in love, scuttling the plans of Jonathan, who is gay, to father Clare's child. Then, when Clare and Bobby have a baby, the three move to a small house upstate to raise "their" child together and create a new kind of family.
