Best gay novels 2024

A confession: I very nearly quit putting this list together. 

Throughout the year I keep a running list, adding recent names whenever I learn about an upcoming queer book—from Tweets, publicist pitches, endless NetGalley scrolls—and I usually commence writing the blurbs for each publication a few months before the list is due. Permit me also insert that, because I am a novelist myself, someone who works very difficult to put words on the page in a good-enough order for someone to respond to them, I experiment and read at least a brief of each publication featured. And here’s an incredible reality that’s both deeply satisfying and makes my job surprisingly difficult: there are more and more queer books published every year. There was a period when I could complete a list like this in an afternoon; I was lucky to find a dozen explicitly queer titles. Now there’s a pretty solid chance I miss a good number of them. 

In mid-December—at the half-way point, and a couple days after my birthday—I looked at the list, halfway done then, and idea, “There’s no way I can complete this. There’s no way I can finish putting together this list in a way that does each guide justice.” Partly it was the volume, yes, and partly it was the amb