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LGBTQ+ Books Dec 2025--Jan 2026 |
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Room on the Sea: Three Novellas
by André Aciman
'The Gentleman from Peru' tells the story of the life-changing encounter of a group of friends with an enigmatic solitary guest in a hotel on the Amalfi Coast. 'Room on the Sea' is a dialogue between a man and a woman who meet on jury duty and embark on a complex relationship. 'Mariana' is a modern retelling of a famous seventeenth-century novel about a love affair between a nun and a swashbuckling, unreliable aristocrat.
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Private Rites
by Julia Armfield
Sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes have not spoken in some time when their father dies. An architect as cruel as he was revered, his death offers an opportunity for the sisters to come together in a new way. In the grand glass house they grew up in, their father's most famous creation, the sisters sort through the secrets and memories he left behind, until their fragile bond is shattered by a revelation in his will. More estranged than ever, the sisters' lives spin out of control: Irene's relationship is straining at the seams; Isla's ex-wife keeps calling; and cynical Agnes is falling in love for the first time. But something even more sinister might be unfolding, something related to their mother's long-ago disappearance and the strangers who have always seemed unusually interested in the sisters' lives. Soon, it becomes clear that the sisters have been chosen for a very particular purpose, one with shattering implications for their family and their imperiled world.
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With Stars In Her Eyes
by Andie Burke
Seconds from a meteoric career launch, cellist Courtney Starling suffers a frightening migraine attack during a key performance. While harmful rumors fly, she escapes to her happy place--her best friend's Kansas bookshop. Courtney's working incognito when a scream sends her leaping off a shelving ladder to find the woman who screamed cowering near the register. When Thea Quinn dropped in for a misdelivered package, she did not expect a mortifying encounter with a bearded dragon in front of an inconveniently attractive bookseller. Clutching an upcoming book club flyer and the tattered shreds of her dignity, she heads back to her new piercing job at the tattoo shop next door. She moved to this quirky place for a fresh start. But maybe the meet-disaster was a sign? Maybe Thea needs to branch out beyond her photography hobby and connect with new people...like at a historical romance book club run by a particularly mysterious and sexy bookseller with a pixie cut? But just as their chemistry heats to a combustion point, consequences from Courtney's past arrive literally on her doorstep at exactly the wrong moment. New revelations and surprising connections take the pair from feeling joyfully lovestruck to confusingly star-crossed. Both women must decide what they're willing to give up for happily ever after.
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Backhanded Compliments
by Katie Chandler
A steamy sapphic romance with a fantastical twist about two bitter tennis rivals who realize they are reluctant soulmates.
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The Midnight Shift
by Seon-Ran Cheon
A bestseller in Korea, a biting, fast-paced vampire murder mystery exploring queer love and the consequences of loneliness.
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Freakslaw
by Jane Flett
It's the summer of '97 and the Scottish town of Pitlaw is itching for change. Enter the Freakslaw--a travelling funfair populated by deviant queers, a contortionist witch, the most powerful fortune teller, and other architects of mayhem. It doesn't take long for the Freakslaw folk to infiltrate Pitlaw's grey world, where the town's teenagers - none more so than Ruth and Derek - are seduced by neon charms and the possibility of escape. But beneath it all, these newcomers are harbouring a darker desire: revenge. And as tensions reach fever pitch between the stoic locals and the dazzling intruders, a violence that's been simmering for centuries is about to be unleashed.
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Kiss Me, Maybe
by Gabriella Gamez
Librarian Angela Gutierrez has never been kissed. But after posting a video about her late bloomer status and ace identity, she's finally ready to get some firsts out of the way. Using her new influencer status to come up with a scavenger hunt idea in which the winner earns her first kiss, Angela realizes she may need some help to pull off the event. Enter Krystal Ramirez, hot bartender and Angela's unrequited crush of five years. Despite vowing that romantic love isn't for her, Krystal seems awfully determined to help Angela pull off the scavenger hunt and find true love. There's just one problem: the connection between Angela and Krystal is getting stronger and stronger the more they hang out, until Angela isn't sure she wants to go through with the scavenger hunt after all. But Krystal is convinced that she isn't capable of love and before long, Angela realizes she's falling head over heels for a woman who may never love her back.
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The Saint Laurent Muse
by C. W. Gortner
The Paris runways of the 70s comes to wild and splashy life in this novel of fashion's it girl Loulou de la Falaise and her life partying and designing with Yves St Laurent, Karl Lagerfeld, and Halston. Nightlife! Gowns! Cocaine! Glamour!
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Volatile Memory
by Seth Haddon
With nothing but a limping ship and an outdated mask to her name, Wylla needs a big pay day. When the alert goes out that a lucrative piece of tech lies hidden on a nearby planet, she calls on all the swiftness of her prey-animal instincts to beat other hunters to it. What you found wasn't your ticket out-it was my corpse wearing an AI mask. When you touched the mask, you heard my voice. A consciousness spinning through metal and circuits, a bodiless mind, spun to life in the HAWK's temporary storage. I crystallized and realized: I was alive. Masks aren't supposed to retain memory, much less identity, but the woman inside the MARK I HAWK is real, and she sees Wylla in a way no one ever has. Sees her, and doesn't find her wanting or unwhole. Armed with military-grade tech and a lifetime of staying one step ahead of the hunters, Wylla and HAWK set off to get answers from the man who disccarded HAWK once before: her ex-husband.
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Loca
by Alejandro Heredia
It's 1999, and best friends Sal and Charo are striving to hold on to their dreams in a New York determined to grind them down. Sal is a book-loving science nerd trying to grow beyond his dead-end job in a new city, but he's held back by tragic memories from his past in Santo Domingo. Free-spirited Charo is surprised to find herself a mother at twenty-five, partnered with a controlling man, working at the same supermarket for years, her world shrunk to the very domesticity she thought she'd escaped in her old country. When Sal finds love at a gay club one night, both his and Charo's worlds unexpectedly open up to a vibrant social circle that pushes them to reckon with what they owe to their own selves, pasts, futures, and, always, each other.
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Direct Descendant
by Tanya Huff
This cozy stand-alone horror novel set in modern-day Toronto is the perfect balance of dark and delightful; a charming love story about a small-town baker, a quick-witted PI, and, yes, an ancient evil.
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Molten Death
by Leslie Karst
Valerie Corbin and her wife Kristen have come to Hawai'i to treat themselves to a tropical vacation. One morning, the couple sets out to see an active lava flow. Spying a boot in the distance, Valerie strides off alone, pondering how it could have gotten there, only to realize to her horror that the boot is still attached to a leg which is slowly being engulfed by the hot lava. Valerie's convinced a murder has been committed- but who's going to believe her? Determined to prove what she saw, Valerie launches her own investigation. But she soon begins to fear she may be the next one to end up entombed in shiny black rock.
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The Maiden and Her Monster
by Maddie Martinez
The forest eats the girls who wander out after dark. As the healer's daughter, Malka has seen how the wood's curse has plagued her village, but the Ozmini Church only comes to collect its tithe, not to protect heretics with false stories of monsters in the trees. So when a clergy girl wanders too close to the forest and Malka's mother is accused of her murder, Malka strikes an impossible bargain with a zealot Ozmini priest. If she brings the monster out, he will spare her mother from execution. When she ventures into the shadowed woods, Malka finds a monster, though not the one she expects--an inscrutable, disgraced golem who agrees to implicate herself, but only if Malka helps her fulfill a promise first and free the imprisoned rabbi who created her. But a deal easily made is not easily kept. And as their bargain begins to unravel a much more sinister threat, protecting her people may force Malka to endanger the one person she left home to save--and face her growing feelings for the very creature she was taught to fear.
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If I Told You, I'd Have to Kiss You
by Mae Marvel
A few rules for the international superspy: (1) Never blow your cover.(2) Never accept the first plan.(3) Never fall for anyone at the agency. Especially if she's your ex-girlfriend. Yardley Whitmer, code name the Unicorn, can do no wrong. She's honed her spycraft and become an instant legend in the field. If only breaking up with her girlfriend were as easy as rappelling off the Eiffel Tower. Living a full-time cover story has slowly eroded her relationship until there's nothing left but lies. KC Tabasco Nolan, hacker extraordinaire, can crack any code--except the one that would tell her the right moment to confess her secret job to Yardley. Now it's too late, and she's in danger of losing the best chance at love she's ever had. When an undercover shakedown goes wrong, Yardley and KC discover the unbelievable truth--that they've both been working at the agency for years. To salvage the mission, they partner up and fly across oceans, race through winding European streets, and give in to inconvenient passion while hiding in an ambassador's linen closet. But can they throw away their rules and fight through their secrets to fall in love with each other's true selves?
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Homegrown Magic
by Jamie Pacton
A delightful queer romantic fantasy full of friends-to-lovers chemistry, found family, rival family drama, and cozy garden magic from two acclaimed YA authors making their adult debut.
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To the Moon and Back
by Eliana Ramage
Steph Harper is on the run. When she was five, her mother fled an abusive husband with Steph and her younger sister in tow to Cherokee Nation, where she hoped they might finally belong. In response, Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA, and ultimately, to go to the moon.
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Food Person
by Adam Roberts
Isabella Pasternack is a food person. She revels in the beauty of a perfectly cooked egg, she daydreams about her first meal at Chez Panisse, and every inch of her tiny apartment teems with cookbooks, from Prune to Cooking by Hand to Roast Chicken and Other Stories. What Isabella is not, unfortunately, is a gainfully employed person. In the wake of a disastrous live-streamed soufflé demonstration, Isabella is summarily fired from her job at a digital food magazine and must quickly find a way to keep herself in buckwheat and anchovy paste. When offered the opportunity to ghostwrite a cookbook for Molly Babcock, the once-beloved television actress now mired in scandal, Isabella warily accepts. Unfortunately, Molly quickly proves herself to be a nightmare collaborator: hungover, flaky, shallow, and--worst of all--indifferent to food. But between Molly's bizarre late-night texts, goofy confessions, and impromptu road trips, Isabella reluctantly begins to see Molly's charms. Can Isabella corral Molly out of the gossip rags and into the kitchen? Can she find the key to Molly's heart and stomach? Or will Isabella's devotion to her culinary idols and Molly's monstrous ego send the entire cookbook--and both of their careers--up in flames?
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Hotter In the Hamptons
by Tinx
Lola has been living her dream. But when her career comes to a screeching halt after a very public snafu, everything Lola has worked for - her loyal following, her designer closet, her perfect boyfriend - starts to go up in flames. And when notorious culture critic Aly Ray Carter lights the final match by writing a scathing exposé, it feels as if Lola has lost it all. When Lola flees to the Hamptons to escape her mistakes, she expects to spend her summer drinking by the pool while carefully rebuilding both her confidence and her brand. Instead, she looks over the trimmed hedges to see none other than her rival and newest neighbor: Aly Ray Carter. As summer blazes on, Lola is swept into an intoxicating situation with the woman who ruined her life, marred by chaos and confusion as she tries to pinpoint why Aly has her so captivated. She thought the Hamptons would be the perfect place to outrun her mess, but quickly realizes there's no place to run.
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Don't Sleep with the Dead
by Nghi Vo
Nick Carraway paper soldier and novelist has found a life and a living watching the mad magical spectacle of New York high society in the late thirties. He's good at watching, and he's even better at pretending: pretending to be straight, pretending to be human, pretending he's forgotten the events of that summer in 1922. On the eve of the second World War, however, Nick learns that someone's been watching him pretend and that memory goes both ways. When he sees a familiar face one very dark night, it quickly becomes clear that dead or not, damned or not, Jay Gatsby isn't done with him. In all paper there is memory, and Nick's ghost has come home.
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Lonely Crowds
by Stephanie Wambugu
Ruth, an only child of recent immigrants to New England, lives in an emotionally cold home and attends the local Catholic girl's school on a scholarship. Maria, a beautiful orphan whose Panamanian mother dies by suicide and is taken care of by an ill, unloving aunt, is one of the only other students attending the school on a scholarship. Ruth is drawn forcefully into Maria's orbit, and they fall into an easy, yet intense, friendship. Her devotion to her charming and bright new friend opens up her previously sheltered world. While Maria, charismatic and aware of her ability to influence others, eases into her full self, embracing her sexuality and her desire to be an artist, Ruth is mostly content to follow her around: to college and then into the early-nineties art world of New York City. Ambition and competition threaten to rupture their friendship, while strong and unspoken forces pull them together over the years.
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Contact Your Librarian for More Great Reads
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Centerville Library
111 W. Spring Valley Rd
Centerville, OH 45458
(937) 433-8091
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Woodbourne Library
6060 Far Hills Ave Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 435-3700
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Creativity Commons
895 Miamisburg Centerville Rd
Centerville, OH 45459
(937) 610-4425
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