Recreation

BooksStories about us: Queer fiction for adults

If you are interested in fiction that explores the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender experience, you may like the following authors and titles:

Searching our catalogue ~ Websites ~ Fiction ~ Mysteries ~ Anthologies

Searching our catalogue

If you are searching the library catalogue, you may find the following subject headings useful:

Top of page

Web sites and other resources

Top of page

Fiction

Graeme Aitken (NZ)
Aitken writes humorous stories of romance from a gay perspective.
Lisa Alther
Five minutes in heaven opens in Paris with Jude, a literary editor, reviewing the events that lead her from Tennessee to France via New York.
Carol Anshaw
Anshaw's writing features offbeat characters, energy and humour with great descriptions and psychological perception. Her stories deal with contemporary manners and mores.
Michael Arditti
The Celibate is a young trainee priest who has a breakdown and this book follows him as he comes to terms with his history and begins work in the slums of the East End guiding tours of Jack the Ripper's crime scenes. He falls for a humble rent boy and then for a sadistic pimp.
Pagan and her parents is the story of Leo, a famous TV personality who raises Pagan, the 6 year old daughter of his close friend, Candida. Candida's adoptive parents, from whom she had been long estranged, insist on taking Pagan from Leo. They lose the first battle in court but win a second battle when Leo's homosexuality is revealed.
James Baldwin
Giovanni's room tells of one man's struggle with his sexual identity in a 1950s Paris swarming with expatriates and characterized by dangerous liaisons and hidden violence.
Just above my head explores the grief of a brother mourning a brother and is the story of gospel singer Arthur Hall and his family. It also explores the black struggle in the United States.
Christopher Bram
Christopher Bram writes about gay life with a strong sense of particular times and places, and he makes use of suspense and imagination.
Rita Mae Brown
Rubyfruit jungle is about growing up a lesbian in America. Born a bastard, Molly Bolt is adopted by a poor southern couple. After being expelled from college, she takes New York by storm, sending female hearts aflutter with her startling beauty, wit and fierce determination.
Jeff Buchanan (NZ)
Sucking Feijoas charts half a century in the lives of three gay men in New Zealand - and the suffering that comes from leading a double life.
William Burroughs
Junkie coverHomosexual themes are a major aspect in this cult writer's work after his novel Junkie.
Frances Cherry (NZ)
Washing up in Parrot Bay is a witty, topical look at NZ women involved with other women and men.
Fiona Cooper
In Blossom at the mention of your name, Geordie yuppie Gerth falls for fairy queen Calum. The tensions between Gerth's success in the heterosexual world and his secret queer home life finally tell.
Dennis Cooper
Cooper's work is intense and is set in a bleak, volatile landscape involving neglected gay teenage boys.
William Corlett
In Now and then, Christopher Metcalfe is 50 and he returns to his childhood home after the death of his father. As he prepares for the burial, he unearths his own past: the one pivotal relationship in his life, which occurred when he was 15 and fell in love with an older boy.
Emma Donoghue
Emma Donoghue has written interesting, historically based novels including fairy tales reworked in a lesbian context.
David Ebershoff
The Danish Girl is inspired by the true story of Danish painter Einar Wegener and his wife. Einar dresses as Lili, the name given to her by Greta, and what started off as a game becomes a way of life for Greta and Einar. Greta finds a surgeon-psychologist at the Dresden Municipal Women's Clinic, and Einar travels to Germany to become Lili Elbe.
David Feinberg
Eighty sixed - In pre-AIDS 1980, B.J. Rosenthal's only mission is to find himself a boyfriend. But in post-AIDS 1986, his life has been permeated by the deadly virus. Friends have been stricken with the disease, making B.J. paranoid.
E M Forster
Maurice written during 1913/14, but published posthumously in 1971, is the story of a young middle class man searching for an own identity within a society which denies his desire for love to a person of the same sex.
Jean Genet
Our Lady of the flowers; Querelle; The Thief's journal Genet was a French writer, poet and outcast, famous for his works which deal with crime and homosexuality.
Jim Grimsley
Grimsley writes tales of gay life and love set in the South of the United States.
Allan Gurganus
Plays well with others - Richard Hartley Mims Jr.and most of his friends are gay in the years when it was chic to come out of the closet. This novel shows the antics of a group of young, ambitious artists, musicians and writers who descend on Manhattan, possessed of talent and the determination to succeed. The spectre of AIDs hovers over the novel and gradually transforms the raunchy narrative to a tribute to lost youth and talent.
Radclyffe Hall
Originally published in 1928, Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness is the timeless story of a lesbian couple's struggle to be accepted by "polite" society. Candid for its time, this novel was the very first to condemn homophobic society for its unfair treatment of gays and lesbians.
Jane Hamilton
The Short history of a prince follows Walter McCloud, a gay man in his late 30s attempting to pull the loose ends of his life together. When young, he had ambition to become a great ballet dancer. The novel tells of Walter's heartbreak as he realizes that his passion cannot make up for the innate talent that he lacks.
E Lynn Harris
Harris writes about contemporary black American life, with the complications of bisexuality, AIDS, and racism.
Andrew Holleran
Holleran is one of the outstanding figures in the contemporary gay literary canon and his fiction has earned praise for its polish and strength.
Alan Hollinghurst
Hollinghurst's first novel The Swimming pool library won wide acclaim and is a vivid account of London gay life before AIDS with a longer perspective on the homosexual history of 20th-century Britain. His other works have a gay theme.
Witi Ihimaera (NZ)
Nights in the gardens of Spain tells of the double life of David Munroe who has a wife and family and also another life, lived mainly at night in what he comes to know as "The Gardens of Spain" where gay and bisexual men meet.
Gary Indiana
Rent boy is the story of a gay New York hustler.
Gone tomorrow consists of 2 linked novellas in which the narrators have a a gay filmmaker friend in common.
Christopher Isherwood
The chronicler of the Berlin world of the movie Cabaret, his novels and autobiographies confront universal questions of alienation and isolation, sexuality and spirituality.
Richard Klein
Jewelry talks is about Abby Zino, the transgendered hero of this interesting novel in which he describes 4 famous women and their jewels, linking sex and jewelry.
David Leavitt
Leavitt has converted gay lives into a matter of interest for mainstream readers, and has been called one of the most poignant and subjective tellers of what it means to be gay.
Robert Leek (NZ)
Sweet and sour cocktails is a book of short stories set in New Zealand.
J T LeRoy
This young novelist has written stunning autobiographical works which have elements of gender confusion and violence at their heart.
Samuel Lock
Lock's novels are set in the milieu of young men living in Chelsea, London in the 1950s and 60s.
Adam Mars-Jones
Mars-Jones has written largely on the topic of AIDS and the family in various forms.
Tales of the City coverArmistead Maupin
Maupin's novels, especially his "Tales of the city", contain witty, realistic dialogue, bizarre plot twists and gay life as an integral part of the broader social milieu. Maupin's main themes include homosexuality, alienation and discrimination, religion, sex and drugs, and love and romance.
Mark Merlis
American studies is the story of  Reeve - as he lies in his hospital bed, figuring out what to do next, he finds himself brooding about the parallel ruin of his old college mentor Tom Slater, a famous American literary scholar who was betrayed and driven to suicide during the McCarthy era.
Isabel Miller
(Isabel Miller is the pseudonym of Alma Routsong) Routsong's writings are considered classics of lesbian fiction. Patience and Sarah is a love story of two women facing life together on the American frontier almost 200 years ago.
Yukio Mishima
Mishima is remembered in the West for his ritual suicide. His writing is notable for the brilliance of his style, the power of his imagination, and the fascination and variety of his themes - they include homosexuality, political terrorism, Zen, and reincarnation.
Paul Monette
Paul Monette was a distinguished writer of poetry, novels, and autobiographical volumes, many dealing with the issues of homosexuality and AIDS.
Ethan Mordden
Mordden's books include character studies, nostalgic recollections, and essayistic analyses that give a picture of male friendships, mostly gay ones.
Timothy Murphy
Getting off clean is a love story crossing both gender and racial lines. A working-class white boy becomes romantically involved with a rich black boy in a small, racially tense town in Massachusetts.
Lesleá Newman
Lesleá Newman is an author, poet, and teacher of creative writing who is strongly motivated by her Jewish heritage and strong feminist philosophy. She has also written books for children that deal with alternative families.
Joseph Olshan
Nightswimmer is about Will Kaplan, haunted by the disappearance 10 years earlier of his lover. Was Chad struck down by a ship during one of the duo's frequent nocturnal swims off the California coast, or did he purposefully vanish from Will's existence?
Vanitas explores the intersections between the worlds of art and art restoration, publishing, and urban relationships, all of which are in the grip of an implacable epidemic - AIDS.
Felice Picano
Picano's work has been praised for using "the history of gay culture as the subject for popular novels," according to New York Times Book Review correspondent Suzanne Berne.
Manuel Puig
Kiss of the spider woman is a famous work in which the question of homosexuality becomes a topic of discussion and debate for the novel's two protagonists. They are a homosexual and heterosexual thrown together for several months in 1975 as cellmates in an Argentine prison. The novel stages an encounter between incompatible political values and views of homosexuality.
John Rechy
John Rechy has devoted some of his closely autobiographical writings to the exploration and presentation of derelict and homosexual life in the United States.
Mary Renault
Renault's historical novels are known for containing sympathetic and convincing treatment of homosexual love, particularly between Alexander the Great, his comrade Hephaestion and the eunuch Bagoas.
Renée
Renée has describes herself as a ‘lesbian feminist with socialist working-class ideals’ and most of her writing, including her fiction, is a direct expression of that conviction.
Ruthann Robson
Robson, who also writes on legal theory, creates characters in her fiction who are flawed, human, sympathetic, and likeable.
Jane Rule
As a lesbian writer, Rule includes at least one lesbian relationship in each of her novels.
Sandra Scoppettone
Scoppettone is the author of young adult novels that deal with homosexuality, alcoholism, and murder. Her adult novels depict characters including a hallucinatory 17 year old, a single parent male detective, and a witty lesbian private investigator.
Stuart Thorogood
Outcast tells the story of Mark, who doesn't want to admit he's gay. He comes from a normal, working-class family. Then he meets Andrew, a gay bartender, and sex and love suddenly come alive for him but his family doesn't respond well.
Colm Toibin
Toibin's spare novels address gay themes in an insightful way which has won him a wide readership.
Joanna Trollope
A Village affair: Alice Jordan moves into a quiet village and forms a sudden, fierce friendship with an independent young woman named Clodagh - a friendship that takes her husband, the villagers, and Alice herself by surprise.
Christos Tsiolkas
Loaded focuses on the experiences of Greek Australian Ari and was made into a movie called "Head on".
Patricia Nell Warren
Warren's novels about the relationship between an ex-Marine track coach named Harlan Brown and his Olympic athlete, Billy Sive, are among the bestselling gay fiction of all time.
Sarah Waters
Sarah Waters' fiction is written in the style of the great Victorian novels. The stories explore aspects of forbidden female sexuality in Victorian England.
Peter Wells (NZ)
Wells is particularly renowned for his evocative short stories as featured in collections such as Dangerous desires.
Edmund White
Edmund White is regarded as the pre-eminent author of the white gay male subculture. His work coincides with the major changes in gay culture from the 1960s to the present. He has a large crossover following among heterosexual readers and critics.
Jeanette Winterson
Lesbian writer Winterson is known for her imaginative and experimental fiction and her autobiographical novel Oranges are not the only fruit.

Top of page

Mysteries

Rose Beecham (NZ)
Amanda Valentine is a lesbian private detective in a series of novels by this NZ author.
Stella Duffy
Saz Martin is a South London "dyke detective" in this series by NZ born, London based author Duffy.
Katherine Forrest
Mystery novels with lesbian LAPD homicide detective and ex-Marine Kate Delafield investigating.
Joseph Hansen
Gay mystery novels featuring detective Dave Brandstetter.
Ellen Hart
Lesbian mystery novels with detective Jane Lawless investigating.
Laurie R King
Lesbian mystery novels featuring detective Casey Martinelli.
Val McDermid
McDermid writes a series of mysteries featuring the lesbian detective Lindsay Gordon.
Sandra Scoppettone
Mystery novels featuring the witty lesbian private investigator Lauren Laurano.
Manda Scott
Lesbian mystery novels with Kellen Stewart investigating.
Penny Sumner
Mysteries with Victoria Cross, lesbian detective, on the case.

Top of page

Anthologies

Afrekete: an anthology of Black lesbian writing edited by Catherine E. McKinley and L. Joyce DeLaney 1995

African-American writers edited by Shawn Stewart Ruff 1996

Best mates : gay writing in Aotearoa New Zealand edited by Peter Wells and Rex Pilgrim 1997

Car maintenance, explosives and love: and other contemporary lesbian writings edited by Susan Hawthorne, Cathie Dunsford and Susan Sayer 1997

Chloe plus Olivia: an anthology of lesbian literature from the seventeenth century to the present compiled and edited by Lillian Faderman 1994

Close calls: new lesbian fiction edited by Susan Fox Rogers 1997

Erotic writing edited by Sue McCauley and Richard McLachlan 1992

The exploding frangipani : lesbian writing from Australia and New Zealand edited by Cathie Dunsford and Susan Hawthorne 1990

Go the way your blood beats : an anthology of lesbian and gay fiction by African-American writers edited and with an introduction by Shawn Stewart Ruff ; foreword by E. Lynn Harris. 1996

Lesbian pillow-book coverThe lesbian pillow book edited by Alison Hennegan 2000

The Penguin book of gay short stories edited by David Leavitt and Mark Mitchell 1994

The Penguin book of international gay writing edited by Mark Mitchell 1995

The Penguin book of lesbian short stories edited by Margaret Reynolds 1993

Spiral 7 : a collection of lesbian art and writing from Aotearoa/New Zealand edited by Heather McPherson 1992

Two friends and other nineteenth-century lesbian stories by American women writers edited by Susan Koppelman 1994

Top of page