13 New Queer Novels We Can't Wait to Read in 2024

Like Happiness is a stunning coming-of-age debut novel that delves into gender, sexual orientation, racial identity, and the charged power dynamics of fame. In the novel, author Ursula Villarreal-Moura uses dual timelines to tell the story of Tatum Vega, a woman who years ago shared a destructive relationship with a famous author named M. Domínguez. In the present timeline of 2015, Tatum lives in Chile with her partner Vera and works at a museum in a job that she loves. Her fraught days in New York with M. Domínguez are long behind her. That is, until she gets a call from a reporter asking for an interview, as Domínguez has been accused of sexual assault. In an instant, Tatum’s former life comes flashing back, along with a series of pointed questions: What really happened between her and Domínguez all those years ago? As Tatum grapples with difficult truths in the present, the second timeline, told through a letter Tatum writes to Domínguez, takes us back to the decade she spent in New York City and the complex, destructive relationship she had with the famed author. Villarreal-Moura’s “emotionally astute novel offers a moving perspective on the different kinds of victims abusers leave in their wake. Memorable and incisive, this debut grapples elegantly with the complexity of betrayal” (Kirkus Reviews).

Publication date: March 26, 2024

We cannot wait to read Exhibit, the latest novel from bestselling author R. O. Kwon, who also wrote The Incendiaries and edited the Kink: Stories anthology. In Exhibit, renowned photographer Jin Han meets injured ballerina Lidija Jung outside a fancy San Francisco party, setting the stage for a fiery love affair. The women stay up all night, despite Jin being married to her college sweetheart Phillip, and find themselves drawn to one another through their shared artistic passions. As their relationship deepens, Jin shares her truths with Lidija — including the disclosure of a family curse she was told she needed to keep secret. Eventually, she shares her body, too. 

Publication date: May 21, 2024

While the term “guncle” has risen in popularity in recent years, gay men have long known the joys of being an uncle to their nieces and nephews. The Guncle Abroad is the second novel in a series from Steven Rowley, a follow-up to Rowley’s 2021 bestseller, The Guncle. The new novel revisits Patrick O’Hara and his niece and nephew, whom he looked after in the first novel in the wake of their mother’s passing. It’s five years later: The kids are back home in Connecticut with their dad, while Patrick is on a career high but a personal low after a rough breakup. When his brother Greg announces he’s getting remarried in Italy, Patrick takes it upon himself to gather his niece and nephew and embark on a European trip. He hopes to give the teenagers the adventure of a lifetime. But once they’re in Europe, things prove to be much harder than he thought.

Publication date: May 21, 2024

Technically, K-Ming Chang’s Cecilia is a novella and not a novel, but don’t let that stop you from adding it to the very top of your 2024 TBR list. A surreal tale about passion, obsession, and female friendship, Cecilia is suffused with themes that would make it the perfect book club pick. In the novella, Seven crosses paths with Cecilia, a woman whom Seven knew as a girl and who has beguiled her for years. When the two get on the same bus, it triggers a flood of intense, vivid memories that overwhelm Seven with desire and blur the lines between the past and the present, real and imagined.

Publication date: May 21, 2024

We’re very much looking forward to reading Blessings, Chukwuebuka Ibeh’s debut novel set in post-military Nigeria. With same-sex relationships on the verge of criminalization, black sheep Obiefuna is sent away to boarding school after his father witnesses him in a moment of same-sex passion. While Obiefuna is forced to hide who he is from the violent, regimented world that surrounds him, his family also struggles. 

Publication date: June 4, 2024

In Thirst, Marina Yuszczuk uses dual-timeline narratives set in very different eras to illustrate the eternal power of desire and the limits of mortality and female agency. In the first timeline, a 19th-century vampire leaves Europe for Argentina and adapts to life in Buenos Aires, where Yellow Fever will soon devastate the population. In the other narrative, set in present-day Buenos Aires, a woman is grappling with her mother’s terminal diagnosis and her own feelings about motherhood. When she meets a vampire in a cemetery, the women connect on a profoundly deep level. 

Publication date: March 5, 2024

Musih Tedji Xaviere’s These Letters End in Tears is another book set in a country where being queer is illegal, and it’s also a heartbreaking interfaith love story. In Cameroon, a relationship blooms between Muslim Fatima and Christian Bessem. Fatima’s older brother eventually finds out, and physically assaults the two girls for having a love that goes against his staunch beliefs. Shortly thereafter, Fatima vanishes after a gay bar raid. Bessem is left to wonder whether Fatima was married off, banished, or worse — until a chance encounter with a mutual friend 13 years later encourages her to start searching for the lost love of her life. 

Publication date: March 12, 2024

Emma Copley Eisenberg’s Housemate has been named a most-anticipated book of 2024 by an array of outlets. Count us among the many who are eagerly looking forward to reading the award-winning author’s new book. In it, Eisenberg tells the story of Bernie and Leah, two close friends and artists who share an apartment in Philadelphia. When Bernie’s former photography professor dies and leaves her an inheritance, the women take off for his rural Pennsylvania home. The pair also decide to document their travels through art, and in the process, learn much about life and love. 

Publication date: May 28, 2024

Armistead Maupin is “one of America’s finest storytellers” (Neil Gaiman) and continues to deliver fantastic novels. Mona of the Manor is the tenth in his famed Tales of the City series, and the first one since 2014’s The Days of Anna Madrigal. Taking place in the early 1990s, the story centers on Mona Ramsey, now a widow and living in a mansion in Britain with her adopted son, Wilfred. The family have to take on paying guests to make things work financially, and their domestic situation is thrown into disarray when Wilfred learns a troubling secret about their two American guests, Rhonda and Ernie Blaylock. With the help of Mona’s girlfriend Poppy, a calligrapher and the town’s postmistress, Mona and Wilfred strive to set things right before people arrive for a big event at their manor. 

Publication date: March 5, 2024

The Future Was Color is another one of the LGBTQ+ books that we’re absolutely dying to read in 2024, as Patrick Nathan’s novel sounds strikingly different from most books out there right now. The historical fiction narrative whisks us away to 1950s Hollywood. Hungarian immigrant George Curtis is working at a studio writing movie scripts when gets an offer from famous actress Madeline that he simply cannot refuse. Madeline asks George to come to her estate in Malibu to work on his political writing, so he leaves behind the studio system and enters into a part of society previously off-limits to him. Eventually, it becomes clear that the writer — a queer Jew who fled Hungary for New York a decade before World War II — cannot escape his past self, no matter how much he strives for reinvention. 

Publication date: June 4, 2024

Hombrecito is an upcoming novel from queer Columbian-American author Santiago Jose Sanchez. It’s a coming-of-age story about a young Colombian boy who is brought to America by his mother in search of a new life. They leave an absent father behind when they move to Miami, where the mother trades in her job as a doctor for work as a waitress. It’s there that the boy cultivates his queer identity, after which he moves to New York and uses men to find something that’s missing. His relationship with his mother, which began deteriorating back in Miami, is further tested when she invites him home to Colombia to see family — where he not only sees his long-lost father but also reconnects with his mother in all her complexities. 

Publication date: June 25, 2024

Myriam LaCroix’s upcoming novel boasts a bevy of blurbs, including one from Tegan and Sara Quinn. And if you can win over lesbian icons of that magnitude, then we certainly need to check out your book. In How It Works Out, Myriam and Allison fall in love, time and time again. Their connection is rewritten in many different versions, with motives, occupations, power dynamics, and other elements shifting and transforming with each new fantasy relationship. The novel explores a world where anything is possible, and passions of the mind and heart coalesce into an extraordinary queer love. 

Publication date: May 7, 2024

The Mars House is a dazzling new work of speculative fiction romance from author Natasha Pulley, who also wrote The Watchmaker of Filigree Street, The Bedlam Stacks, The Half Life of Valery K, and others. Pulley’s latest centers on January, a former ballet dancer who flees Earth for the terraformed Mars colony of Tharsis. There, January lives as a second-class citizen — a foreign Earthstronger who is seen as both lesser-than and threatening for having a body that has not yet adjusted to lower gravity. Xenophobic politician Aubrey Gale believes that all Earthstrongers should be compelled to participate in a disabling naturalization process. Gale is also struggling to bounce back from a disastrous press junket, so they propose an idea to January: A marriage of convenience that would benefit them both. The pair end up falling for each other, but soon one of Gale’s enemies emerges to throw their relationship — and all of Tharsis — in jeopardy. 

Publication date: March 19, 2024