The best LBGTQ+ speculative books that will break you and then put you back together again

This book is utterly un-put-downable. I read it one, feverish sitting. It’s about a boy, Owen, who is literally born with a bird in his chest. She talks to him, and she’s quite funny and sometimes snarky. Owen is known as a Terror, and his mother does everything she can to try to protect him from the Army of Acronyms, aka doctors, nurses, social workers, and anyone who wants to study him and expose him.

Although this speculative premise plays a prominent role in the book, the heart of the book for me is this tender, queer, coming-of-age story about a boy trying to accept himself and let others accept and love him, too. It’s beautiful, smart, and aches in all the right places. 

I’ve read this book many times—most recently, I read it out loud to my wife. It’s lyrical, swoony, full of queer yearning, and oh so very charming.

The story is primarily told in letters between two rivals in a “time war,” in which two sides basically travel up and down the timeline of the world trying to sabotage each other’s efforts. To me, the details of this war matter very little, because we know how brutal and senseless wars can be, how both sides often lose sight of what they’re even fighting over in the first place. But what matters is that these rivals see something stirring in each other and they can’t resist the pull—their letters quickly escalate from playful flirtation to full-blown love.

Written with intelligence, wit, and searing social commentary, this book follows Jo, a 28-year-old woman living in a world in which witches are not only real but are feared, put on trial, and killed—she has until the age of 30 to marry a man or else she’ll have to register with the Bureau of Witchcraft and be closely monitored.

On top of that, Jo’s mother disappeared 14 years ago, and we meet her as she is just beginning to accept the idea that her mother might be dead. However, that all changes when she gets an opportunity to honor her mom’s one last request. What ensues is a powerful exploration of grief, autonomy, freedom, desire, community, and so much more. At once heartbreaking and hopeful, Giddings will have you savoring every word.

Our Wives Under the Sea feels almost unclassifiable to me, in the best way possible. Is it speculative? Yes. Is it horror? Sort of. Is it also a love story? Yes.

Written in dreamy, lyrical, meandering prose, it follows Miri and Leah in the aftermath of Leah, a marine biologist, having finally returned from a deep-sea trip that took a horrifying turn, though we aren’t entirely sure what happened down there. All we know is, Leah is traumatized and definitely not herself. It is gorgeous, suspenseful, and devastating. Plus, it has the energy of that girlfriend meme: “Would you still love me if I were a worm?” and that’s all I’m going to say about that. Okay, and it made both my wife and me cry.

Full disclosure, I blurbed this knockout of a novel, and I would do it one hundred times over. It takes place in a near-future dystopia ravaged by climate change. However, a billionaire TERF has started a new climate relief program called Inside, which promises a safe and hopeful future for its members (but we all know that’s far from the real story).

Following an unforgettable cast of diverse characters, including some who get accepted to Inside, this book is at once suspenseful, haunting, and revelatory. It’s about queer community, survival, chosen family, paternalism, the harms of white feminism, parenting, freedom vs. control, and hope, always, always hope. It’s highly propulsive, and you’ll probably read it in one sitting just like I did.