Pride Month is an excellent time to check out some great new titles from LGBTQ authors or about the LGBTQ community. We have curated a selection of recent additions to our collection for you, or you can check out our LGBTQ category for more! We are highlighting some of our favourites below.
We also are pleased to have some of the titles by Canadian authors nominated in for Lambda awards. The Lambdas were created 34 years ago to nurture and advocate for LGBTQIA+ writers, and affirm the value of the lives and stories of the folks in the LGBTQIA+ community.
There are more than 100 books nominated across 24 different categories. Fiction, nonfiction, biography/memoir, poetry, romance, anthologies and books for kids and teens. You can find the full list on the Lambda site but we did want to highlight 3 titles by Canadian authors.
Care Of: Letters, Connections, and Cures by Ivan Coyote (Transgender fiction category)
Northern Light by Kazim Ali (LGBTQ nonfiction category)
And congratulations to Alix Ohlin who won the Lambda for the Bisexual fiction category for her book We Want What We Want.
The listeners: A novel by Jordan Tannahill
A propulsive literary page-turner about a family torn apart by a mother's obsession with a sound that no one else can hear One night, while lying in bed next to her husband, Claire Devon suddenly hears a low hum. This innocuous sound, which no one else in the house can hear, has no obvious source or medical cause, but it begins to upset the balance of Claire's life. When she discovers that one of her students can also hear the hum, the two strike up an unlikely and intimate friendship. Finding themselves increasingly isolated from their families and colleagues, they fall in with a disparate group of people who also perceive the sound. What starts out as a kind of neighbourhood self-help group gradually transforms into something much more extreme, with far-reaching, devastating consequences. The Listeners is an electrifying novel that treads the thresholds of faith, conspiracy and mania. Compelling and exhilarating, it forces us to consider how strongly we hold on to what we perceive, and the way different views can tear a family apart
A Dream of a Woman: Stories by Casey Plett
An ethereal meditation on partnership, sex, addiction, romance, groundedness, and love, the stories in A Dream of a Woman buzz with quiet intensity and the intimate complexities of being human.
The spectacular: A novel by Zoe Whittall
It's taboo to regret motherhood. But what would happen if you did? Shifting perspectives and time periods, The Spectacular is a multi-generational story exploring sexuality, gender and the weight of reproductive freedoms, from the author of The Best Kind of People. It's 1997 and Missy's band has finally hit the big time as they tour across America. At twenty-two years old, Missy gets on stage every night and plays the song about her absent mother that made the band famous. Missy is the only girl in the band and she's determined to party just as hard as everyone else, loving and leaving someone in every town. But then a forgotten party favour strands her at the border. Forty-something Carola is just surfacing from a sex scandal at the yoga centre where she has been living, when she sees her daughter, Missy, for the first time in ten years—on the cover of a music magazine. Ruth is eighty-three and planning her return to the Turkish seaside village where she spent her childhood. But when her granddaughter Missy winds up crashing at her house, she decides it's time that the strong and stubborn women in her family find a way to understand each other again. In her new book, by turns sharp and provocative, Zoe Whittall captures three generations of very different women who struggle to build an authentic life in the absence of traditional familial and marital structures. Definitions of family, romance, gender and love will radically change as they seek out lives that are nothing less than spectacular
You still look the same by Farzana Doctor
A moving collection of poetry about navigating mid-life, full of humour and wit, from acclaimed novelist Farzana Doctor. This debut poetry collection from acclaimed novelist Farzana Doctor is both an intimate deep dive and a humorous glance at the tumultuous decade of her forties. Through crisp and vivid language, Doctor explores mid-life breakups and dating, female genital cutting, imprints of racism and misogyny, and the oddness of sex and love, and urges us to take a second look at the ways in which human relationships are never what we expect them to be
The Untranslatable I by Roxanna Bennett
In unmeaningable, her previous Trillium Poetry Awards winning book with Gordon Hill Press, Roxanna Bennett renovated the North American disability poetics canon via her queer fusion of invisible and visible disability identities. The Untranslatable I builds on Roxanna's acute sense of form and cripping of myth by establishing a more reflective, heartbreaking voice that asks, "Was I chosen? Is this a gift or a curse?" and provides answers not as prescribed path or cure, but as beautiful song.
