Darcy’s just returned to her library job. She took leave following a mental breakdown. She’s immediately faced with a local right-wing journalist’s ire over the library’s materials and a storytime believed to be a drag event (it wasn’t). Darcy’s also emailing with a patron named Sammy, whose questions begin benign but become increasingly personal. Austin’s book is a story about grief, relationships, and mental health, and it’s also a love letter to libraries and inclusivity. The book both resonates deeply in our era of censorship and library attacks and provides a real burst of hope, too. —Kelly Jensen

Burn Down Master’s House is a standout work of historical fiction that stares unflinchingly back at the horrors of slavery in the United States. Its focus on acts of rebellion and revolution—based on real historical events—is more important than ever in a time when our government is actively trying to whitewash over the real history of this country. This book should be required reading. —Rachel Brittain

While a destination wedding at a Wild West-themed venue may sound like a version of hell, Fin is determined to make the best of it and write a perfect officiant speech. Along with his friend Jacque, he quickly allies with the other queer people at the wedding. The group identifies wedding enemies, assesses each other’s relationships, and discusses the value of marriage in general. The elongated weekend of celebration makes space for everything a wedding has to offer: awkward mic moments, passive aggressive comments, and true transcendent joy. This book unravels the differences between love, weddings, and marriage with tenderness and wit. —Julia Rittenberg

T Kira Madden applied the thoughtfully provocative storytelling that made her 2019 debut, Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, a standout memoir to her debut novel. Pulling from personal experience and insight about the systems that purport to protect victims and process predators, Madden exposes the rippling and lifelong impacts of child sex abuse. Every character in this story is rendered in full color to illustrate stories far bigger than words like survivor, ally, predator, enabler. This emotionally tense literary thriller isn’t about vengeance or reclamation but about the hard and fraught consequences of unthinkable violation and how our systems fail us. —S. Zainab Williams

Screenwriter and producer Rasheed Newson is known for his work on shows like Bel-Air and The Chi. He brings his industry insider knowledge to this dazzling historical novel about queer life in Golden Age Hollywood. It tells the story of Xavier, an up-and-coming Black actor, and Aaron, the studio “fixer” tasked with keeping Xavier in the closet. That becomes much more complicated when Xavier is cast in a biopic as the Navy hero Aaron fell in love with while fighting alongside him in WWII. Newson beautifully blends real historical figures with richly layered fictional characters to create an unforgettable story that I’m already dying to see adapted for the screen. —Susie Dumond

They say there are only two real stories: a stranger comes to town; a man goes on a journey. Douglas Stuart delivers variations on both in this gorgeously rendered novel about a young man returning to the small island in the Outer Hebrides where he was raised. He is gay, and his father doesn’t know. His father is gay, and he doesn’t know. Are these men on a collision course to revelation and connection, or will fear, shame, and the perceived judgment of their community keep them in separate closets? Stuart hits every note in this story about all the things that matter: family, identity, faith, and what it really means to be seen. —Rebecca Joines Schinsky

Sebastian boldly goes where no man has gone before, with her heartwarming Star Trek-inspired contemporary debut following quarreling actors on a long-running sci-fi show falling in love. After Simon’s contract ends, he wants to leave and continue his career in New York City. Just one problem: after his frequent petty fights with Charlie, he doesn’t want the industry to think he’s difficult. Embarking on a PR friendship to change the narrative ignites a careful romance. Now, Charlie and Simon must chart a relationship amid fandom chatter, industry expectations, and their unruly inner thoughts. If difficult people creating queer community is also your catnip, you’ve struck gold. —R. Nassor

Cozy sci-fi + spaceship adventures + a sentient moss life support system with serious abandonment issues? Yes please! That would already be more than enough to win me over; but add in an overly optimistic heroine determined to save her sister’s life, compelling sci-fi worldbuilding, and interesting alien species, plus a not-quite-unrequited romance, and you can see why I absolutely devoured this book. I guarantee you will too. —Rachel Brittain

Maia Kobabe (Gender Queer) makes eir’s middle grade debut with this wonderful graphic novel cowritten/illustrated with Lucky Srikumar. It grapples with gender identity, first periods, crushes, and that in-between feeling so common for middle graders. Indian American tween Saachi’s fellow seventh-graders are obsessed with dating, but the changes that come with puberty and middle school make Saachi anxious. She’d like to opt out of the mess, please! Few middle grade novels address puberty through a nonbinary lens. In a time when LGBTQ+ books are disappearing from kidlit, it’s a much-needed perspective into a difficult time for many kids. —Margaret Kingsbury

The life of Charity and Sylvia, a lesbian couple who lived openly in 19th century Vermont, is fascinating in itself, and acclaimed cartoonist Tillie Walden tells this story with such deftness: slice-of-life vignettes are interspersed with letters, dreams, lists, and mentions of Black and Indigenous history unfolding at the same time. My heart ached for these two deeply religious women, who even after decades together, fear their love will be their damnation. This is the first book I’ve ever read that moved to me to sobs within a single page. (They were good tears!) Don’t miss the website for extensive annotations and background information. —Danika Ellis