Pride Month 2025 – Bookseller Picks
Recommendations30th May 2025
For Pride Month, our team have chosen some of their favourite recent memoirs, poetry collections, novels by queer writers. There's something for everyone!
Love in Exile
Published: 6th Feb '25
Format: Hardback
Price: £20.00
LOTE
LOTE centres Black, queer, and trans writers, artists, and creatives within the Modernist period by following someone traversing hidden archives and stories. Writer and archivist Mathilda discovers Hermia Druitt, a Black contemporary of Virginia Woolf and lost to literary archives, so she begins to research and write about this icon. But was Hermia actually forgotten? Or were they purposefully written out of history? As Mathilda navigates the racist structures of academia and archival work, she also experiences series of transformations. LOTE is a brilliant story in which outsiders are the center of the universe.
Jenna
Published: 26th Mar '20
Format: Paperback
Price: £8.99
The Emperor of Gladness
As in all his work, Vuong's use of language is beautiful and poetic on memory, love, grief and the politics of family (both lost and found) as protagonist Hai comes to terms with the loss of the expectations he had for himself. ★★★★★
Euan
Published: 15th May '25
Format: Hardback
Price: £20.00
Love is a Dangerous Word
Published: 1st Apr '24
Format: Paperback
Price: £14.99
Ace
This is an excellent blend of research and personal stories that offers a powerful critique of the pedestal on which Western society has put romantic love and sexual desire. Chen doesn't set out to define the ace experience, instead highlighting a spectrum of experiences. The world will not look the same upon finishing.
Zoe
Published: 14th Sep '21
Format: Paperback
Price: £14.99
Sterling Karat Gold
From the first page, where we witness a bullfight taking place under the narrator's window in Hackney, this novel brings the reader on a surrealist, inventive, wild adventure! Radical and playful, it denounces state violence against marginalised communities whilst reaffirming solidarity as its counterpoint – the only way forward for a more just, tender society.
Alice
Published: 24th Jun '21
Format: Paperback
Price: £9.99
All Fours
An artist heads off on a road trip across the US and stops at a motel thirty minutes away, reinventing her life and leaving behind her husband and child. At no point did I know where we were going to end up but I enjoyed getting there. Unabashedly intimate and absurdly funny, July's handling of ageing, womanhood and sexuality is done with a thoughtful and skilful freedom.
Molly
Published: 15th May '25
Format: Paperback
Price: £9.99
Super Gay Poems
Published: 25th Apr '25
Format: Hardback
Price: £24.95
Ordinary Saints
The Team
Published: 15th Apr '25
Format: Hardback
Price: £16.99
Dysphoria Mundi
The Team
Published: 27th Mar '25
Format: Paperback
Price: £16.99
Like Love
A window into her mind whilst writing the likes of Bluets and The Argonauts, Like Love is a collection of essays and conversations that explores all the ways art shapes, challenges, and influences us. Though academic in content, Nelson's critical voice is unlike any other - subversive, thoughtful, strange, and clever, her writing is both fascinating and digestible. Her conversation with Eileen Myles is a personal favourite!
Faye
Published: 29th May '25
Format: Paperback
Price: £10.99
Roses for Hedone
A new addition to publisher 404INK's brilliant Inklings essay series, Roses for Hedone asks what more can pleasure offer us and explores queer hedonism as a transformational route which embodies the power for change.
The Team
Published: 8th May '25
Format: Paperback
Price: £7.50
The Diaries of Mr Lucas
The Team
Published: 1st May '25
Format: Paperback
Price: £10.99
Foreign Fruit
Foreign Fruit is a measured yet powerful examination of the history, symbolism and travels of the orange told through the lens of Goh's family history. Her investigation begins with the fruit bowl on her parents' kitchen table and goes on to cross continents and follow historic trade routes, all in the pursuit of big questions about memory, family and identity.
Molly
Published: 8th May '25
Format: Hardback
Price: £16.99
Haruko/Love Poems
The Team
Published: 26th Jan '23
Format: Paperback
Price: £9.99
Deep House
The Team
Published: 5th Jun '25
Format: Hardback
Price: £25.00
Valencia
The Team
Published: 5th Jun '25
Format: Paperback
Price: £10.99
I Heard Her Call My Name
Lucy Sante’s memoir chronicling her journey to transition later in life, is one of the most thoughtful and moving books I’ve read in a long time. Her journey is one that takes her from Europe to the US, friends lost and found, and reflections on a life lived feeling never truly oneself. It’s a poignant and beautifully written work that explores the complexities of human relationships and identity. Sante’s writing is so readable I finished I Heard Her Call My Name in a single afternoon.
Jack
Published: 6th Mar '25
Format: Paperback
Price: £10.99
Stag Dance
Torrey Peters is one of my favourite contemporary writers. I first came to her work via stories she published online, including The Masker, which is (a brilliant) part of this new collection. Three stories and a novel comprise Peters’ new book, eagerly awaited since the publication of Detransition Baby, and each explores and expands the worlds that her characters are navigating in unique and powerful ways. Her writing doesn’t shy away from the messiness and difficulties of navigating identity and human vulnerability and I can’t wait to see what she does next.
Jack
Published: 13th Mar '25
Format: Hardback
Price: £16.99
Zami
Published: 5th Jul '18
Format: Paperback
Price: £9.99
Daddy Boy
This is one of the most unique books I've ever read. Part memoir, part queer theory, Emerson Whitney's Daddy Boy chronicles their journey alongside a storm-chasing group across America. We jump between childhood memories and laments about transness & ageing in this excellent exploration of queerness, and life years beyond coming out, and beyond becoming comfortable in who you are.
Faye
Published: 21st Sep '23
Format: Paperback
Price: £10.99
Murray Hall
The Team
Published: 17th Apr '25
Format: Hardback
Price: £16.99
Thirst
Published: 24th Oct '24
Format: Hardback
Price: £16.99
This Arab Is Queer
Published: 16th Jun '22
Format: Paperback
Price: £14.99