English Lesbian and Queer Fiction

Rachel is twenty-four, a lapsed Jew who has made calorie restriction her religion. By day, she maintains an illusion of existential control, by way of obsessive food rituals, while working as an underling at a Los Angeles talent management agency. At night, she pedals nowhere on the elliptical machine. Rachel is content to carry on ....

Kathy Acker holds a unique place among American novelists as a writer who consistently pushes at the frontiers of modern fiction, with each new work advancing further into unchartered territory. Based loosely on the relationship between Colette Peignot and Georges Bataille, My Mother: Demonology tells the powerful story of a woman ....

Maria, a trans woman in her thirties, is going nowhere. She spends her aimless days working in a New York bookstore, trying to remain true to a punk ethos while drinking herself into a stupor and having a variety of listless and confusing sexual encounters.After her girlfriend cheats on her, Maria steals her car and heads for the ....

Everyone knows that Nick and Charlie are the perfect couple – that they're inseparable. But now Nick is leaving for university, and Charlie will be left behind at Sixth Form. As the time to say goodbye draws closer, both boys begin to question: is their love strong enough to survive being apart? After all, first loves rarely last forever...

Nightwood tells the stories of the love-lives of a group of Americans and Europeans in Paris in the 1920s - an exotic, night-time underworld, eccentric, seedy and beautiful. One of the earliest novels to explicitly portray homosexuality, the influence of Djuna Barnes' novel has been, and continues to be, exceptional. Nightwood is not only ....

NW is Zadie Smith's masterful novel about London life. Zadie Smith's brilliant tragicomic NW follows four Londoners - Leah, Natalie, Felix and Nathan - after they've left their childhood council estate, grown up and moved on to different lives. From private houses to public parks, at work and at play, their city is brutal, beautiful and ....

Brilliant, heartbreaking and highly original, Ocean Vuong's debut novel is a shattering portrait of a family, and a testament to the redemptive power of storytelling.'A marvel' Marlon JamesThis is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a ....

"On Earth We re Briefly Gorgeous" is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family's history that began before he was born a history whose epicenter is rooted in Vietnam and serves as a doorway into parts of his life his mother has never known, ....

A queer and dangerously hungry mountain lion lives in the drought-devastated land under the Hollywood sign. Lonely and fascinated by humanity’s foibles, the lion spends their days protecting a nearby homeless encampment, observing hikers complain about their trauma, and, in quiet moments, grappling with the complexities of their gender ....

Jeanette is adopted and brought up by her mother as one of God's elect. Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts. At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves.

As his tale begins, Orlando is a passionate young nobleman whose days are spent in rowdy revelry, filled with the colourful delights of Queen Elizabeth's court. By the close, he will have transformed into a modern, thirty-six-year-old woman and three centuries will have passed. Orlando will not only witness the making of history from its ....

For readers of Damon Galgut, Brandon Taylor and J M Coetzee, an atmospheric story of love and violence in rural Pakistan from an exceptional new literary voiceOn the train from Karachi, as dusk begins to fall, Fahad's dreams of his summer in London are fading. He is headed to Abad, the family's feudal estate, where his father intends ....