4 queer literary fiction books that you need to read

‘In the Dream House’ by Carmen Maria Machado

This one isn’t strictly literary fiction; it is actually a memoir. It is beautifully written, and heartbreaking. Machado’s relationship with her lover is her dreamhouse. It charts the arc of an emotionally abusive, same-sex relationship with daring. The writing is in second person, and well pulled off, you are likely to be fully immersed. Machado tries to deconstruct the logic of abuse, the love bombing, walking on eggshells, the never-ending toxicity, and finally chronicles how she managed to leave.

“In this way, the Dream House was a haunted house. You were the sudden, inadvertent occupant of a place where bad things had happened. And then it occurs to you one day, standing in the living room, that you are this house's ghost: you are the one wandering from room to room with no purpose, gaping at the moving boxes that are never unpacked, never certain what you're supposed to do. After all, you don't need to die to leave a mark of psychic pain. If anyone is living in the Dream House now, he or she might be seeing the echo of you.”

More from Lifestyle

‘Young Mungo’ by Douglas Stuart

Gritty and gross, Young Mungo has been written by Booker Prize winning author Douglas Stuart. Though not quite as strong as Shuggie Bain, his debut novel. Set in the same bruised Glasgow — post-Thatcher, sectarian, deeply suspicious of softness. Fifteen-year-old Mungo Hamilton doesn't fit. He is too sensitive for the schemes, too gentle for the gang his brother runs, raised largely by siblings because their mother keeps disappearing into the bottle. When he meets James, a Catholic boy whose dovecot becomes a refuge from everything outside its walls, what begins with pinky fingers locked in the dark grows into something neither of them has language for. It's a Romeo and Juliet story, essentially — except grimier, and told with prose that, as one reviewer put it, genuinely gleams and shimmers.

 “Mungo’s capacity for love frustrated her. His loving wasn’t selflessness; he simply couldn’t help it. Mo-Maw needed so little and he produced too much, so that it all seemed a horrible waste. It was a harvest no one had seeded, and it blossomed from a vine no one had tended. It should have withered years ago, like hers had, like Hamish’s had. Yet Mungo had all this love to give and it lay about him like ripened fruit and nobody bothered to gather it up.”

‘Fruit Fly’ by Josh Silver

An incredibly audacious story, this tells the tale of Mallory, a one-hot-wonder, who wrote a bestseller, and then somewhat fades into oblivion. She lives on the hinges of her husband, Ronan, till she fully comes alive again, after meeting Leo, a meth addict (whom she exploits, to write her own story). This book is genuinely hard to put down. It’s a psychological thriller, and will force you to reckon with, what really gives us happiness in life, and whether it is really as ‘pure’ as we believe it to be.

Fruit Fly released only about a month ago, and it’s on its way to become an internet sensation. It’s incredibly funny, too.

“Virginia Woolf would have loved Grindr.”

 ‘Rubyfruit Jungle’ by Rita Mae Brown

Published in 1973,  by a small women's collective — no mainstream publisher would touch it — Rubyfruit Jungle went on to sell over 70,000 copies before Bantam eventually came around. Rita Mae Brown's protagonist Molly Bolt is funny, lusty, and resolutely unlabelled, and she arrived at a moment when lesbian readers had essentially no literature that reflected their lives back at them. The novel follows Molly from a complicated childhood through to adulthood in New York, and what makes it remarkable is its flat refusal to treat lesbianism as tragedy or subtext. It has its complexities and some of its attitudes haven't aged gracefully, but as a act of literary defiance, it still lands.

“Anyway, how did I know the president was for real? I never saw him, just pictures in the paper and they can make those up. How do you know someone is real if you don't see him?”