The Must-Read Queer Books of 2025

Each year brings a new wave of queer literature, but 2025 stands out as a season of remarkable ambition, emotional depth, and genre-defying experimentation. Across fiction, memoir, fantasy, horror, and poetry-infused prose, LGBTQ authors around the world have delivered books that illuminate the breadth of queer life—its joys, its devastations, its long histories, and its imagined futures.

For OutSmart’s annual roundup, we combed through the year’s most acclaimed releases—those championed by critics, celebrated by readers, and recognized by major literary outlets. The result is a curated list of works that challenge norms, expand representation, and capture queer experience in all its complexity.

Stag Dance: A Novel & Stories
by Torrey Peters

In this inventive collection, Peters expands the boundaries of trans fiction through a novel about rival lumberjacks preparing for a gender-bending dance and three sharp, unsettling stories about obsession, identity, and transformation. Acidly funny and deeply observant, the book explores desire at its messiest and most revealing.

Necessary Fiction
by Eloghosa Osunde

Osunde maps the intertwined lives of queer Nigerians navigating Lagos’s creative, cultural, and political landscapes. Through a kaleidoscope of interconnected characters, the novel examines chosen family, survival, and self-making in a society that both celebrates and constrains them. Lyrical and fearless, it’s a landmark work of African queer fiction.

Baldwin: A Love Story
by Nicholas Boggs

This revelatory biography examines James Baldwin’s most significant romantic and artistic partnerships and how they shaped his voice. Drawing on newly uncovered archives and interviews, Boggs reveals a portrait of Baldwin centered not solely on politics or fame, but on the queer intimacies that fueled his greatest work.

Forest Euphoria
by Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian

Queer mycologist Kaishian blends memoir and biology to uncover the abundant queerness of the natural world—from intersex slugs to fungi with thousands of sexes. Part science writing, part personal narrative, the book challenges readers to see nature as inherently diverse and delightfully nonbinary.

Great Black Hope
by Rob Franklin

Franklin’s gripping debut follows a queer Stanford graduate whose life unravels after a wrongful arrest and the sudden death of his best friend. As he seeks justice, he confronts grief, privilege, and the weight of public narratives. A suspenseful, emotionally rich story about identity and accountability.

A Language of Limbs
by Dylin Hardcastle

Hardcastle weaves two parallel coming-of-age stories set in 1970s Australia, following two women forced to choose between queer desire and social expectation. Their divergent paths converge decades later, forming an intimate portrait of love, loss, and community shaped by the AIDS crisis. A poetic, art-filled tribute to queer resilience.

Open, Heaven
by Seán Hewitt

Hewitt’s debut novel chronicles a charged,
tender relationship between two teenage boys in a rural English village. With the lyricism of a poet, he explores first love, longing, and the ache of wanting more than the world seems willing to offer. A hauntingly beautiful story of queer awakening.

You Weren’t Meant to Be Human
by Andrew Joseph White

This visceral work of queer body horror follows a trans man navigating an alien invasion that promises transformation at a terrible price. White combines gore, social commentary, and aching vulnerability to create a story about survival, autonomy, and the monstrous ways society treats marginalized bodies.

Mazeltov
by Eli Zuzovsky

Set at a chaotic bar mitzvah on the edge of war, Zuzovsky’s debut examines queer desire, family conflict, and national identity through sharp satire and emotional clarity. Multiple narrators reveal a young boy’s coming-of-age against the backdrop of Israel’s political tensions and personal revelations.

The Emperor of Gladness
by Ocean Vuong

In his first novel since On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong returns with a lyrical story of survival, unlikely kinship, and the quiet miracle of choosing to stay. In East Gladness, Connecticut, Hai—a young man contemplating suicide—is stopped by Grazina, an elderly widow. As he becomes her caretaker, they form an unexpected family with other overlooked townspeople. The Emperor of Gladness is a tender, mythic meditation on grief, resilience, and chosen family.

Available now at your local independent bookseller, at Barnes & Noble, or on Amazon.