March 31st is the International Transgender Day of Visibility, which makes it a particularly great day to check out books written by transgender and nonbinary authors. Here are 15 recent books written by transgender and nonbinary authors for teen and adult readers, representing a wide variety of genres including memoir, science fiction, romance, and fantasy.
Always the almost : a novel
by Edward Underhill Determined to win the Midwest's biggest classical piano competition, 16-year-old trans boy Miles Jacobson finds himself distracted by the new boy in town, a proudly queer cartoonist who makes him feel like he's enough, instead of almost enough. |
Ander and Santi were here : a novel
by Jonny Garza Villa When their parents hire Santiago Garcia, a hot new waiter, nonbinary teen Ander Lopez immediately falls in love, and through Santi's eyes, understands everything they are and want to be as an artist, until the outside world creeps in, threatening everything. |
Any Other City
by Hazel Jane Plante Any Other City is a two-sided fictional memoir by Tracy St. Cyr, who helms the beloved indie rock band Static Saints. Side A is a snapshot of her life from 1993, when Tracy arrives in a labyrinthine city as a fledgling artist and unexpectedly falls in with a clutch of trans women, including the iconoclastic visual artist Sadie Tang. Side B finds Tracy, now a semi-famous musician, in the same strange city in 2019, healing from a traumatic event through songwriting, queer kinship, and sexual pleasure. While writing her memoir, Tracy perceives how the past reverberates into the present, how a body is a time machine, how there's power in refusing to dust the past with powdered sugar, and how seedlings begin to slowly grow in empty spaces after things have been broken open. |
Chef's kiss : a novel
by T. J. Alexander A perfectionist pastry chef working at a cookbook publisher must learn how to deal with the obnoxiously chipper new kitchen manager who begins softening her heart and comes out as nonbinary to mixed reactions at work. |
Endpapers
by Jennifer Savran Kelly Dawn Levit, a bookbinder conservationist working at the Met in 2003 and dealing with her gender identity discovers a love letter hidden in the endpapers of a 1950's lesbian pulp novel and tries to track down the author. |
Fine : a comic about gender
by Rhea Ewing Graphic artist Rhea Ewing celebrates the incredible diversity of experiences within the transgender community with this vibrant and revealing debut. For fans of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Meg-John Barker's Queer, Fine is an essential graphic memoir about the intricacies of gender identity and expression. As Rhea Ewing neared college graduation in 2012, they became consumed by the question: What is gender? This obsession sparked a quest in their quiet Midwest town, where they anxiously approached both friends and strangers for interviews to turn into comics. A decade later, their project has exploded into a fantastical and informative portrait of a surprisingly vast community spread across the country. |
Hijab butch blues : a memoir
by Lamya H A queer Muslim immigrant recalls her coming of age and how she drew inspiration from the stories in the Quran throughout her lifetime search for safety and belonging. |
Just like home
by Sarah Gailey Called back home by her mother, Vera must not only face the love she had for her serial-killer father, but also confront the secrets yet undiscovered in the foundations of the notorious Crowder house, finding out just how deep the rot goes. |
Please miss : a heartbreaking work of staggering penis
by Grace E. Lavery Follows the author, a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet and 100%, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster, as she, once she solved her “penis problem,” embarks on many misadventures as she journeys towards a new trans identity. |
Self-made boys : a Great Gatsby remix
by Anna-Marie McLemore Three teens chase their own version of the American Dream during the Roaring 20s in this YA remix of The Great Gatsby. |
The Sunbearer Trials
by Aiden Thomas Chosen to participate in The Sunbearer Trials, where the loser is sacrificed to refuel the Sun Stones, Teo, the 17-year-old trans son of the goddess of birds, must compete against more powerful and better trained opponents for fame, glory and his own survival. |
Vagabonds!
by Eloghosa Osunde In Nigeria, the lives of a group of vagabonds--the poor, the queer, the drivers and dancers, the abused, displaced and vulnerable--intertwine in bustling markets and underground clubs, churches and hotel rooms where they are seized and challenged by spirits who command the city's dark energy. |
The wicked bargain
by Gabe Cole Novoa Hiding a magical ability to manipulate fire and ice, transmasculine nonbinary teen pirate Mar teams up with the most unlikely allies to reverse a wicked bargain made by their father and retrieve his soul from el Diablo. |
When we were sisters : a novel
by Fatimah Asghar After the death of their parents, three Muslim American sisters are left to raise one another, and as the youngest, Kausar, grows up, she must choose whether to remain in the life of love, sorrow and codependency she's known or carve out a new path for herself. |
World running down
by Al Hess Valentine Weis is a salvager in the future wastelands of Utah. Wrestling with body dysphoria, he dreams of earning enough money to afford citizenship in Salt Lake City--a utopia where the testosterone and surgery he needs to transition is free, the food is plentiful, and folk are much less likely to be shot full of arrows by salt pirates. But earning that kind of money is a pipe dream, until he meets the exceptionally handsome Osric. Once a powerful AI in Salt Lake City, Osric has been forced into an android body against his will and sent into the wasteland to offer Valentine a job on behalf of his new employer--an escort service seeking to retrieve their stolen androids. The reward is a visa into the city, and a chance at the life Valentine's always dreamed of. But as they attempt to recover the "merchandise", they encounter a problem: the android ladies are becoming self-aware, and have no interest in returning to their old lives. |