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7 powerful books to read this Pride Month

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Brighton, UK
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Your definitive guide to the best queer literature you need this summer. 

We all know that Pride Month isn’t just a time for celebration. It’s also a time for reflection, community, and storytelling. And what encapsulates this trifecta more than a good bit of queer literature?

From books to journals and speeches, the words of queer writers have always been a radical act: a means of documenting desire, identity, loss, love, and resistance in a world that has too often tried to erase it. And as Pride celebrations become increasingly commercialised, it’s more vital than ever to spotlight the voices that have shaped – and continue to define – this community.

Whether you’re seeking something poetic, political, or heartbreakingly human, these seven books offer a rich spectrum of LGBTQ+ experience — destabilizing the center across continents, generations, and genres.

So head to your nearest (ideally independent) bookstore, add these texts to your basket, and thank me later.


Love in Exile – Shon Faye 

Combining the personal and the political, Shon Faye’s emotive memoir tracks her own relationship with love amidst a heteronormative and misogynist world. Love in Exile is a sharp, often devastating meditation on what it means to love under capitalism – both as a trans person and, frankly, anyone with a beating heart.

Following on from her hit non-fiction book The Transgender Issue, in which she explored the subject of trans liberation in Britain, Faye now turns the gaze inward to unpack her understanding of romantic love and how this shapes her identity as an adult.

What ultimately sets this text apart from other musings on modern romance is it’s undercurrent of optimism – balancing a sharp critique of our contemporary notions of co-dependence, masculinity, and togetherness with a hopeful belief that love belongs to all of us, if only we learn to view it a new and open-minded way.


On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous – Ocean Vuong 

A novel as searing as it is tender, On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous traces the overlapping traumas of queerness, migration, and intergenerational violence.

Written as a letter from a son to his illiterate mother, Vuong’s semi-autobiographical work examines how language can both liberate and estrange. Its queer love story – as vulnerable as it is brutal – exists against a backdrop of war, poverty, and the relentless pressures of assimilation.

It is, ultimately, a meditation on the cost of survival in a world that was designed to work against you.


The Song of Achilles – Madeline Miller

Fair warning, you’ll want to get the tissues out for this one. A retelling of Homer’s Iliad, Madeline Miller’s novel reclaims the love between Achilles and Patroclus from centuries of euphemism and subtext, and has become something of a modern queer classic.

By rendering this love story explicit, luminous, and devastating, Miller reclaims a relationship that has too often only been queered in subtext. But The Song of Achilles owes much of its success to the fact that it’s ‘not just a love story.’ Rather it’s an exploration of how desire collides with empire, masculinity, and the machinery of war.

With page-turning prose and a vivid fantasy world, Miller reminds us that queerness has always existed – even if history has tried to write it out.


Evenings and Weekends – Oisín McKenna 

A raw, funny, and deeply contemporary portrait of modern queer life, Evenings and Weekends is set against the backdrop of a rapidly gentrifying London.

Over the course of the novel, which unfolds across a single midsummer weekend, McKenna follows a group of friends navigating precarious work, hookup culture, rent crises, and the search for meaning amid the noise. McKenna’s writing captures the rhythms of queer community – messy, joyful, sometimes alienating, but always vital.

This is a novel that understands the politics of survival, and the ways queer communities continue to reinvent kinship under capitalism’s crushing weight


What it Feels Like for a Girl – Paris Lees

Paris Lees’ memoir is a raw, electrifying portrait of growing up trans in working-class Nottingham in the 1990s and early 2000s. It is, by turns, hilarious, defiant, and devastating – a testament to resilience in the face of violence, poverty, and the constant threat of marginalisation.

But Lees refuses pity. Her story thrums with rebellion: against the limitations of gender, class, and a society that refuses to see trans lives as fully human.

Lees charts her adolescence with unflinching honesty, capturing the contradictions of a life lived between worlds: between genders, between chaos and care, and between survival and self-discovery.

Giovanni’s Room – James Baldwin

Arguably the most widely known and loved novel on this list, James Baldwin’s seminal text Giovanni’s Room was first published in 1956 and remains one of the most haunting and essential works of queer literature today.

Baldwin’s novel follows David, an American man in Paris, as he grapples with his love for the enigmatic Giovanni, and the suffocating weight of societal expectation.

It’s a story of passion and shame, desire and denial, rendered in prose so elegant it’s almost painful. And more than half a century later, Baldwin’s insights into identity and alienation still cut devastatingly close.


Shuggie Bain – Douglas Stuart 

Shuggie Bain won the Booker Prize when it was published in 2020, and continues to engage a steady stream of new readers year on year.

Set in 1980s Glasgow amid the collapse of industry and the scourge of addiction, the novel follows Shuggie, a boy whose effeminate manner and queerness render him an outsider long before he understands why.

Stuart masterfully depicts how class, gender, and sexuality intersect – and how queerness becomes both a site of alienation and, paradoxically, of survival. This is working-class queer storytelling at its most unflinching, so proceed with caution. But for all of its harrowing plot lines, this moving come-of-age novel is entirely worth it.

Senior Remote Writer Brighton, UK

I’m Flo, (She/Her) a Senior Remote Writer at Thred. I recently completed a Masters in Visual Anthropology, and seek to interrogate the ways digital spaces can amplify marginalised voices in the arts and cultural sectors. Follow me on LinkedIn or ping me some feedback via email.

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