5 of the Most-Anticipated Queer Books of the Summer

Six and Green are two Asian American trans women who are dating. Together, they are competing in the men’s pro indoor volleyball league—but on rival teams. They travel around the world to compete, broadcasting their relationship to parasocial fans, but when their teams face off against each other in the championship, they also face a P.R. crisis that could blow up their reputations. This is an “outrageous and deeply serious satire,” and I can’t wait to read it!

I loved Mattie Lubchansky’s previous graphic novel, Boys Weekend, a satirical trans horror story, so I can’t wait to pick up her newest one. Simplicity follows a trans man living in the walled city of New York in 2081. He’s hired to do an anthropological survey of the cult of Simplicity in the Catskills. He’s charmed by this community, but he begins to have visions of monstrous and beautiful creatures—and then members of Simplicity start to go missing.

This is the fourth and final book in the lesbian cozy fantasy series that started with Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea! These have been so charming, and I’m looking forward to seeing how the story concludes. In this volume, Reyna and Kianthe deal with a threat from a radical alchemist—and more importantly, an influx of tourists ruining the vibe of their small town. Can their bookshop/tea shop survive it, or will they need to close it down to save Tawney?

Chuck Tingle is making a name for himself not just in the erotica/romance world (see I’m Gay For My Living Billionaire Jet Plane), but also the horror genre. He’s following up Camp Damascus and Bury Your Gays with Lucky Day, which is set in the aftermath of the Low-Probability Event: a day where eight million people died in seemingly unrelated freak accidents. Vera, a bisexual statistics and probability professor, is teaming up with Special Agent Layne to investigate an inexplicably lucky casino which might explain that event—and could be the key to prevent it from happening again.

I loved Jamison Shea’s sapphic YA horror book I Feed Her to the Beast and the Beast Is Me so much that I knew I’d have to read anything they wrote next. Roar of the Lambs is a bi4bi apocalyptic YA thriller with a genderqueer main character. Winnie is a teen psychic who lies to clients at the oddities shop to give them reassuring readings—they pay better that way. When she finds a box made of bone in the ashes of her childhood home, it shows her a vision of an apocalyptic future—one where she and two rich kids, Apollo and Cyrus Rathbun, are at the center. Together, she and Apollo investigate what Apollo’s cousin Cyrus is up to, and how they can prevent the box’s prophecy from coming true.