7 LGBTQ+ Books to Add to Your TBR

Detective Betty Rhyzyk is a tough-as-nails Brooklyn cop recently transplanted to Dallas, TX with her girlfriend. In The Dime, she's got a new job with the Dallas Police Department but when her first major case goes sideways from the get-go, it's all downhill from there for Betty. Not only do her new coworkers distrust her, but she's also dealing with a stalker and case that has dangerous ties to a drug cartel. Betty chases each lead down faithfully, but when she gets too close to the truth, she'll find herself in over her head, having to rely on every ounce of New Yorker grit to make it out alive.

In The Burn, Betty is still recovering from her injuries sustained at the end of The Dime, and so is her partner, who seems to become increasingly hooked on painkillers. To make matters worse, confidential informants seem to be dying left and right, suggesting that someone in the DPD is leaking information. Frustrated and increasingly suspicious, Betty goes rogue in order to investigate, heading straight to the darkest corners of Dallas...and she isn't entirely surprised when the crimes point back to her own department.

Both of these books feature a tough heroine, good procedural detective work, high stakes, and a meticulously described Dallas that shimmers with heat and danger.

In this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Arthur Less is an author who is about to turn, 50 when his ex-boyfriend of nine years sends him a wedding invitation. Arthur can't say yes, and he can't say no–either option is too humiliating–so instead, he accepts a handful of dubious invitations to literary festivals around the world. What starts out as the perfect excuse to avoid his ex turns into an epic adventure from Paris to Berlin to India to the Arabian Sea. Along the way, Arthur turns 50, learns to let go of his past, and embrace new love.

This classic, first published in 1945, is about Charles Ryder and his friendship with the Flytes, a wealthy Catholic family that lives in Brideshead Castle from the 1920s to the early 1940s. When Charles encounters Sebastian Ryder during their university days, Sebastian introduces him to his friends and family, opening up Charles's world and exposing it to bigger ideas on love, relationships, and religion. Charles eventually enters into a relationship with both Sebastian and his younger sister, Julia. Due to the time period, the nature of the relationship between Charles and Sebastian is written subtly but is unmistakably of the romantic nature.

In this new memoir, Dunham writes about always feeling like a visitor in their body, and the various identities that they have embodied over the years. As they began to transition between Grace and Cyrus, they began to think more deeply about the conventions and conceptions of self, and how the world views identity. This is a deeply personal and honest memoir about coming of age and grappling with gender, family, and transformation.

Most people tend to think that red states are full of conservatives espousing bigotry and that anyone born queer in those states makes their escape as soon as they possibly can. Not so. In this book, Samantha Allen takes a road trip across the United States to rural, out-of-reach, and politically conservative towns to interview the real queer people who live there and have no plans to move and to get their take on what it means to be a queer person who lives in a rural area. The result is part memoir, part road trip diary, and part investigative journalism that will challenge how people think about rural areas and the LGBTQ+ community.

When citing the differences between men and women, and in trying to understand the fluidity of sexuality, most people point at biological differences in the brain. But in this book, neurologist Daphna Joel proposes that there is no "male brain" or "female brain"–there are just brains with female and male attributes, and everyone's brain is made up of a mosaic of these attributes. Gender is not binary, and the authors back this up with extensive research from the latest neurological studies and information about the variations even within gender binaries. This book will challenge you to think beyond the binary, and demonstrate how doing so can open up our world.