Gay Fiction That Doesnt Suck
Discover the best gay fiction books that don't suck! Explore our curated list of top-tier LGBTQ+ novels with compelling stories, rich characters, and unforgettable narratives.
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More Tales of the City
by Armistead Maupin
The tenants of 28 Barbary Lane have fled their cozy nest for adventures far afield. Mary Ann Singleton finds love at sea with a forgetful stranger, Mona Ramsey discovers her doppelgÄnger in a desert whorehouse, and Michael Tolliver bumps into his favorite gynecologist in a Mexican bar. Meanwhile, their venerable landlady takes the biggest journey of all—without ever leaving home.
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Further Tales of the City
by Armistead Maupin
The calamity-prone residents of 28 Barbary Lane are at it again in this deliciously dark novel of romance and betrayal. While Anna Madrigal imprisons an anchorwoman in her basement, Michael Tolliver looks for love at the National Gay Rodeo, DeDe Halcyon Day and Mary Ann Singleton track a charismatic psychopath across Alaska, and society columnist Prue Giroux loses her heart to a derelict living in San Francisco park.
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Babycakes
by Armistead Maupin
"An extended love letter to a magical San Francisco." --New York Times Book Review When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there's more to making a baby then meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbor, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first work of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS. "Armistead is a true original. His tales are bang up-to-date. They will surprise and maybe even shock you, but, I promise, they will make you laugh." --Ian McKellen "Maupin has a genius for observation. His characters have the timing of vaudeville comics, flawed by human frailty and fueled by blind hop." --Denver Post "Armistead Maupin's San Francisco saga careens beautifully on." -- New York Times Book Review
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Significant Others
by Armistead Maupin
Tranquillity reigns in the ancient redwood forest until a women-only music festival sets up camp downriver from an all-male retreat for the ruling class. Among those entangled in the ensuing mayhem are a lovesick nurseryman, a panic-stricken philanderer, and the world’s most beautiful fat woman. Significant Others is Armistead Maupin’s cunningly observed meditation on marriage, friendship, and sexual nostalgia.
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Sure of You
by Armistead Maupin
A fiercely ambitious TV talk show host finds she must choose between national stardom in New York and a husband and child in San Francisco. Caught in the middle is their longtime friend, a gay man whose own future is even more uncertain. Wistful and compassionate, yet subversively funny, Sure of You could only come from Armistead Maupin.
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Michael Tolliver Lives
by Armistead Maupin
Having survived the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers, Michael has learned to embrace the random pleasures of life, the tender alliances that sustain him in the hardest of times.
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The Back Passage
by James Lear
A seaside village, an English country house, a family of wealthy eccentrics and their equally peculiar servants, a determined detective - all the ingredients are here for a cozy Agatha Christie-style whodunnit. But wait - Edward `Mitch' Mitchell is no Hercule Poirot, and The Back Passage is no Murder of Roger Ackroyd. Mitch is a handsome, insatiable 22-year-old hunk who never lets a clue stand in the way of a steamy encounter, whether it's with the local constabulary, or his schoolmate and fellow athlete Boy Morgan, who becomes his Watson.
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Rough Music
by Patrick Gale
Beautifully written and deeply compassionate, Rough Music is a novel of one family at two defining points in time. Seamlessly alternating between the present day and a summer thirty years past, its twin stories unfold at a cottage along the eastern coast of England. Will Pagett receives an unexpected gift on his fortieth birthday, two weeks at a perfect beach house in Cornwall. Seeking some distance from the married man with whom he's having an affair, he invites his aging mother and father to share his holiday, knowing the sun and sea will be a welcome change for. But the cottage and the stretch of sand before it seem somehow familiar and memories of a summer long ago begin to surface. Thirty-two years earlier. A young married couple and their eight year-old son begin two idyllic weeks at a beach house in Cornwall. But the sudden arrival of unknown American relatives has devastating consequences, turning what was to be a moment of reconciliation into an act of betrayal that will cast a lengthy shadow. As Patrick Gale masterfully unspools these parallel stories, we see their subtle and surprising reflections in each other and discover how the forgotten dramas of childhood are reenacted throughout our lives. Deftly navigating the terrain between humor and tragedy, Patrick Gale has written an unforgettable novel about the lies that adults tell and the small acts of treason that children can commit. Rough Music gracefully illuminates the merciful tricks of memory and the courage with which we continue to assert our belief in love and happiness.
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50 Reasons to Say Goodbye - A Novel
by Nick Alexander
Mark is looking for love in all the wrong places. He always ignores the warning signs preferring to dream, time and again, that he has met the perfect lover until, one day, finally he does... Through fifty different adventures, Nick Alexander takes us on a tour of modern gay society: bars, night-clubs, blind dates, internet dating...it's all here. Funny and moving by turn, 50 Reasons to Say 'Goodbye' is ultimately a series of candidly vivid snapshots and a poignant exploration of that long winding road; the universal search for love.
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Sottopassaggio - A Novel
by Nick Alexander
Following the loss of his partner in a car crash, Mark, the hero from the bestselling 50 Reasons to Say 'Goodbye', tries to pick up the pieces and build a new life for himself in gay-friendly Brighton. Haunted by the death of his lover and a fading sense of self, Mark struggles to put the past behind him, exploring Brighton's high and low life, falling in love with charming but unavailable Tom and hooking up with Jenny, a long lost girlfriend from a time when such a thing seemed possible. A novel that weaves the past to the present and the present in the future.
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Good Thing Bad Thing
by Nick Alexander
On holiday with new boyfriend Tom, Mark - the hero from the best-selling novels, 50 Reasons to Say Goodbye and Sottopassaggio - heads off to rural Italy for a spot of camping. When the ruggedly seductive Dante invites them onto his farmland the lovers think they have struck lucky, but there is more to Dante than meets the eye - much more. Racked with suspicion, it is Mark who notices as their holiday starts to spin slowly but very surely out of control - and it is Mark, alone, who can maybe save the day...
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Better Than Easy
by Nick Alexander
The fourth volume in the bestselling 50 Reasons series finds Mark about to embark on the project of a lifetime: the purchase of a hilltop gite in a remote French village with partner Tom. But with shady dealings making the purchase unexpectedly complex, Mark begins to wonder not only if this is the right project but also whether Tom is the right man. Better Than Easy combines a tense tale of betrayal with a warming exploration of the mix of courage and naivety required to choose both love and happiness.
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Corfu
by Robert Dessaix
Novel inspired by the life of little-known Australian writer Kester Berwick. Set in the Greek islands, Adelaide and London's suburbs. An Australian actor living alone in the cottage of a man he's never met pieces together the life of the writer whose house he is living in, which he begins to compare with his own. Explores themes of love, friendship, the ordinary and extraordinary, and exile and home. Author is a writer, literary commentator, translator and broadcaster, who spent 10 years as presenter of ABC Radio National's 'Books and Writing'. Previous titles include the autobiography 'A Mother's Disgrace' and novel 'Night Letters'.
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When You Don't See Me
by Timothy James Beck
Being invisible is Nick Dunhill's MO. For 19 years he's hidden himself from his family, and now in NYC he's still keeping himself to himself. He walks the city streets, drinks in dive bars, cleans apartments and tries to co-exist with his three flatmates - all while keeping his wounded heart under wraps, wondering if anything ever lasts. But now his vanishing act is about to be challenged. Nick is forced into the land of the living - into relationships and opportunities, love and sex, and finally into an acceptance of his past and the chances of his future.
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Enduring Love
by Ian McEwan
From the Booker Prize winner and bestselling author of Atonement—a brilliant and compassionate novel of love, faith, and suspense, and of how life can change in an instant. "A remarkable novel, haunting and original and written in prose that anyone who writes can only envy." —The Washington Post The calm, organized life of science writer Joe Rose is shattered when he sees a man die in a freak hot-air balloon accident. A stranger named Jed Parry joins Rose in helping to bring the balloon to safety, but unknown to Rose, something passes between Parry and himself on that day—something that gives birth to an obsession in Parry so powerful that it will test the limits of Rose's beloved rationalism, threaten the love of his wife, Clarissa, and drive him to the brink of murder and madness.
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Brokeback Mountain
by Annie Proulx
The friendship between Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two cowboys, evolves into an intimate relationship while they are working together as a herder and camp tender, sharing a bond that spans many years and frequent separations.
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Grief
by Andrew Holleran
Now in paperback, the universally acclaimed novel about loss and yearning Reeling from the recent death of his invalid mother, an exhausted, lonely professor comes to our nation's capital to escape his previous life. What he finds there -- in his handsome, solitary landlord; in the city's somber mood and sepulchral architecture; and in the strange and impassioned journals of Mary Todd Lincoln -- shows him unexpected truths about America and loss.