LGBTQ - General Fiction

This list has been created by a Library Assistant at Wake County Public Libraries (WCPL) and encompasses *most* of the LGBTQ+ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, plus other identitites such as, intersex, asexual, aromantic, demisexual, demiromantic, nonbinary, genderqueer, and more) titles categorized under "Fiction" in the WCPL collection as of July 19, 2025.

Showing 1 - 20 of 165  There are a total of 354 valid entries on the list.
Book cover for "I make envy on your disco"
Star rating for I make envy on your disco
Description:
"It's the new millennium and the anxiety of midlife is creeping up on Sam Singer, a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor. Fed up with his partner and his life in New York, Sam flies to Berlin to attend a gallery opening. There he finds a once-divided city facing an identity crisis of its own. In Berlin the past is everywhere: the graffiti-stained streets, the candlelit cafés and techno clubs, and the astonishing mash-up of architecture, monuments,...
Book cover for "Work nights"
Star rating for Work nights
Description:
"Jane Grabowski hauls herself to her nine to five office job at New York City's most acclaimed newspaper to sit in stale air under severe florescent lights and mask her rage by sending emails with too many exclamation points. Luckily, Jane has a reason to keep coming into the office: Madeline, the distractingly beautiful intern. Madeline has never dated a woman and is uncomfortable with labels but with carefully timed lunch breaks and painstakingly...
Book cover for "Days of light"
Star rating for Days of light
Description:
"A sweeping, sensual historical novel about one woman's unconventional life lived in search of an answer by the award-winning author of The End We Start From and The Harpy. In 2017, Megan Hunter burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, The End We Start From, a startlingly beautiful story of climate change and motherhood that is now a feature film starring Jodie Comer. Her second book, The Harpy, fiercely explored marriage and power through...
Book cover for "A language of limbs"
Star rating for A language of limbs
Description:
"Newcastle, Australia, 1972. On a sticky summer night, a choice must be made: To give in to queer desire or suppress it? To venture into the unknown or stay the course? In alternating chapters, we trace the two versions of a life that follow. In one, a teenage girl is caught kissing her neighbor and is kicked out from her home. She lands at a queer communal home in Sydney called Uranian House, where she meets the people who will forever become her...
Book cover for "This love"
Star rating for This love
Author:
Description:
When Mae and Ari meet outside a crowded gay bar during their final year of university, their connection is instant, sparking a lifetime friendship. Stubborn and no stranger to breaking hearts, Mae needs Ari's bright light to guide her out of her self-centered ways. Reeling from a scandal in New York, vibrant, charming Ari sees Mae as an anchor keeping him grounded. Though they are young, ambitious, and queer, both Mae and Ari secretly daydream about...
Book cover for "Soft core"
Star rating for Soft core
Description:
"A stripper's madcap search for her missing ex-boyfriend takes her over the edge in this whip-smart, wildly funny novel about love, sex, work, and sex work."--
Book cover for "The in-between bookstore"
Star rating for The in-between bookstore
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
"A whimsical and healing novel about a trans man in New York who-almost 30, laid off, broke-moves back to his small Illinois hometown, walks into the bookstore he worked at in high school. . . and slips through time to come face-to-face with his pre-transition, teenage self"--
Book cover for "Mothers and sons"
Star rating for Mothers and sons
Description:
"A mother and son, estranged for years, must grapple with the shared secret that drove their lives apart..."--Provided by publisher.
Book cover for "Good girl"
Star rating for Good girl
Author:
Description:
"In Berlin's artistic underground, where drugs and techno fill warehouses still pockmarked from the wars of the twentieth century, nineteen-year-old Nila at last finds her tribe. Born in Germany to Afghan refugees, raised in public housing graffitied with swastikas, drawn to philosophy, photography, and sex, Nila has spent her adolescence disappointing her family while searching for her voice as a young woman and artist. Then in the haze of Berlin's...
Book cover for "The three lives of Cate Kay"
Star rating for The three lives of Cate Kay
Average Rating:
4.2 stars
Description:
"Cate Kay knows how to craft a story. As the creator of a bestselling book trilogy that struck box office gold as a film series, she's one of the most successful authors of her generation. The thing is, Cate Kay doesn't really exist. She's never attended author events or granted any interviews. Her real identity had been a closely guarded secret, until now. As a young adult, she and her best friend Amanda dreamed of escaping their difficult homes...
Book cover for "Remember you will die"
Star rating for Remember you will die
Description:
"From the author of When Franny Stands Up comes a genre-bending story told in linked obituaries and newsfeeds over three hundred years about one AI woman grappling with her grief after the mysterious death of her human daughter, and wondering what it really means to be human. What will it take for the death of Poppy Fletcher to make sense? Poppy Fletcher dies too young, and the entire world is eager to accept it and move on. Except for her mother,...
Book cover for "But how are you, really"
Star rating for But how are you, really
Description:
"Sex and culture critic Ella Dawson's But How Are You, Really, about a burned-out bisexual young woman who attends her five-year college reunion and confronts her estranged chosen family, old demons, and the ex she maybe shouldn't have walked away from. But How Are You, Really is equal parts sexy second chance romance, a powerful reckoning with toxic workplace culture and burnout, and an exploration of surviving emotional abuse and what it means to...
Book cover for "What I Know about You"
Star rating for What I Know about You
Description:
"In a tight-knit Levantine Christian family in 1960s Cairo, Tarek's entire life is written in advance. He'll be a doctor like his father, marry, and have children. Under the watchful eye of the family's strong women, he starts to do just that - until a patient's son, Ali, enters his life and turns it upside down. The two men's unsayable relationship sparks a series of events as dramatic as the Six-Day War and assassination of President Anwar Sadat...
Book cover for "How to leave the house"
Star rating for How to leave the house
Average Rating:
2 stars
Description:
"This is the story of twenty-four hours in the life of Natwest, and his small-town odyssey in pursuit of [a] missing package. And yet it's also the story of a middle-aged dentist who dreams of being a respected artist--but the only thing he can seem to paint is the human mouth. And it's the story of a tortured imam involved in a quasi-romantic entanglement with the local vicar; and an octogenerian mourning the death of her secretive husband; and a...
Book cover for "Small rain"
Star rating for Small rain
Description:
"A poet's life is turned inside out by a sudden, wrenching pain. The pain brings him to his knees, and eventually to the ICU. Confined to bed, plunged into the dysfunctional American healthcare system, he struggles to understand what is happening to his body, as someone who has lived for many years in his mind. This is a searching, sweeping novel set at the furthest edges of human experience, where the forces that give life value--art, memory, poetry,...
Book cover for "The night of Baba Yaga"
Star rating for The night of Baba Yaga
Description:
"Tokyo, 1979. Yoriko Shindo, a workhorse of a woman who has been an outcast her whole life, is kidnapped and dragged to the lair of the Naiki-kai, a branch of the yakuza. After she savagely fends off a throng of henchmen in an attempt to escape, Shindo is only permitted to live under one condition: that she will become the bodyguard and driver for Shoko Naiki, the obsessively sheltered daughter of the gang's boss. Eighteen-year-old Shoko, pretty and...
Book cover for "The palace of Eros"
Star rating for The palace of Eros
Description:
"A bold retelling of the traditional Greek myth of Psyche and Eros through a queer and feminist lens, grappling with the complex and thorny questions of how to harness the power of female and queer joy and cultivate freedom in a world that seeks to cage us"--
Book cover for "Idlewild"
Star rating for Idlewild
Description:
"Idlewild is a tiny, artsy Quaker high school in lower Manhattan. Students call their teachers by their first names, there are no grades, and every day begins with 20 minutes of contemplative silence in the Meetinghouse. It is during one of those meetings that an airplane hits the Twin Towers. For two Idlewild outcasts, 9/11 serves as the first day of an intense, 18-month friendship. Fay is prickly, aloof, and obsessed with gay men; Nell is shy, sensitive,...
Book cover for "Fellow travelers"
Star rating for Fellow travelers
Description:
In a world of bare-knuckled ideology and secret dossiers, Timothy Laughlin, a recent college graduate and devout Catholic, is eager to join the crusade against Communism. An encounter with a handsome State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Tim's first job and, after Fuller's advances, his first love affair. As McCarthy mounts a desperate bid for power and internal investigations focus on "sexual subversives" in the government, Tim and...
Book cover for "A wounded deer leaps highest"
Star rating for A wounded deer leaps highest
Average Rating:
3 stars
Description:
In 1980's Oregon, Smokey is figuring out how to survive childhood with a young mom who is increasingly desperate in her search for love. As their mother's boyfriends come and go, Smokey aches for the comfort and safety their mother can never quite provide. When a dangerous new man moves into the house, Smokey seeks refuge in the nearby forests--finding comfort as they give themselves over to the strength and beauty of the natural world.