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NAMED BY THE NEW YORK TIMES AS ONE OF THE 10 BEST ROMANCES OF 2023.

Somewhere foggy, 1837 . . .

Poppy had always loved the night, so it wasn’t too much of a bother to wake one evening in an unfamiliar home far from London, weak and confused and plagued with a terrible thirst for blood, to learn that she could no longer step out into the day. And while vampirism presented several disadvantages, it more than made up for those in its benefits: immortality, a body that could run at speed for hours without tiring, the thrill of becoming a predator, the thing that pulls rabbits from bushes and tears through their fur and flesh with the sharp point of a white fang.

And, of course, Roisin. The mysterious woman who has lived for centuries, who held Poppy through her painful transformation, and who, for some reason, is now teaching her how to adjust to her new, endless life. A tight, lonely, buttoned-up woman, with kindness and care pressed up behind her teeth. The time they spend together is as transformative to Poppy as the changes in her body, and soon, she finds herself hopelessly, overwhelmingly attached. But Roisin has secrets of her own, and can’t make any promises; not when vengeance must be served.

Soon, their little world explodes. Together and apart, they encounter scores of vampires, shifty pirates, conniving opera singers, ancient nobles, glamorous French women, and a found family that throws a very particular sort of party. But overhead, threat looms—one woman who is capable of destroying everything Poppy and Roisin hold dear.

Samara Breger's A Long Time Dead is a lush, Victorian romance, drenched in blood and drama, about the lengths two women will go to secure a love that cannot die.

A kaleidoscopic, intimate coming-of-age novel of modern queer life

Set in London across a single, life-altering summer, Curtis Garner's debut novel, Isaac, is a queer story for our digital age, offering new perspectives on desire and intimacy, adolescent obsession, and dangerous first love.

Isaac is an inexperienced gay youth whose first sexual encounter via a dating app is disappointing, yet thrillingly addictive. He spends his final months before university escaping into a dizzying new world of casual sex, but his world changes when he meets twenty-eight-year-old Harrison at a party.

Isaac is immediately drawn to this handsome, charismatic artist, but as they grow closer, his sense of self becomes increasingly hazy. As Harrison becomes more demanding, Isaac tries everything to prove his worthiness, but he soon realizes that he must confront his toxic ideas about love, sex, and men, as well as himself.

Written with verve and confidence, Isaac brilliantly captures the capriciousness of youth and the vagaries of queer desire.

A techno-horror portrait of the fears and desires of six young artists whose lives are upended by a controversial video game, from National Book Award finalist Mónica Ojeda.

Six young artists share an apartment in Barcelona: Kiki Ortega, a researcher writing a pornographic novel; Iván Herrera, a writer whose prose reveals a deeply conflicted relationship with his body; three siblings, Irene, Emilio, and Cecilia, who quietly search for ways to transcend their abuse as children; and El Cuco Martínez, a video-game designer whose creations push beneath the substrate of the digital world. All of them are connected in different ways to Nefando, a controversial cult video game whose purpose remains a mystery. In the parallel reality of the game, players found relief from the pain of past trauma and present shame, but also a frighteningly elastic sense of self and ethics. Is Nefando a game for horror enthusiasts, a challenge to players' morals, or a poetic exercise? What happens in a virtual world that admits every taboo?

Unsparing, addictive, and perverse, Nefando takes us to the darkest corners of the web, revealing the inevitable entanglement of digital and physical worlds, and of technology and horror.

Kristen Zimmer, author of The Gravity Between Us, When Sparks Fly, and Forbidden Girl takes readers on an adrenalin-fueled dystopian journey into the future where a scrappy band of rebels rise up to bring down an unequal and unrelenting government.

This is your future.

The United States of America has been gone for over a century.

In its place, The Unified American Territories—a nation divided, the impoverished and the wealthy are separated by a looming steel wall. In the Northern Territories—The Vault, as it is known by its inhabitants—the government rules with an iron fist: All citizens are tested for intelligence and aptitude, thrust into compulsory higher education and saddled with insurmountable debt. All student loans are granted and controlled by a branch of the regime called The Federal Bureau of Education. Failure to repay their debt consigns borrowers to the Knowledge Reclamation Process, a mysterious government-sanctioned brainwashing program that strips them of their education with dire mental and physical side effects.

Fletcher Daniels is a recent college graduate struggling to stay ahead of her arrears. After a visit from Reclamation Agents, she knows her life is about to change for the worse. Enter Youth Opposed to Reclamation, a scrappy band of rebels who try in their own small way to bring some relief to the people of The Vault by smuggling as many potential Reclaimees to safety as possible. When Fletcher meets and falls for fellow female YOR member, Sparrow, her world is twisted away from the one she once knew even more radically. The group offers Fletcher a chance to escape her fate, but through them, she sees the promise of bringing real change to The Vault. History has taught her that even the smallest rebellions can trigger revolutions. It’s time for history to repeat itself.

Marion Barbara Carstairs—"Joe" to her friends—began a life of adventure soon after her birth in 1900, when a camel accident gave her the spark of inspiration to change her name to Tuffy.

Joe was an adrenaline junkie who drove an ambulance in the First World War, piloted speedboats into history as "the fastest woman on water," flew an airplane through a hurricane, and battled crocodiles. Her love life was no less whirlwind. "I came out of the womb queer," she said, preferring suits and ties over dresses, and enjoying affairs with Gwen Farrar, Dolly Wilde, Marlene Dietrich, and Tallulah Bankhead among countless other women. Her longest acquaintance was Tod Wadley, a doll who was her muse, companion, and reflection. With him, she governed the Caribbean island of Big Whale Cay for forty years, living her extraordinary windswept life of romance and speed through every twist and turn of the 20th century.

Joe the Pirate brings these thrilling episodes of history to life with vivid artwork and a wryly subversive critique of the jet set; a tale of adventure, danger, and passion for our time.

As our lives and deaths grow ever stranger, housewives, students and executives all find themselves in situations that become increasingly disturbing. Strange things don’t only happen when you are asleep. Fowler’s powerful narratives are subtly affecting and will make you think again about the way you look at the world around you.

Christopher Fowler runs The Creative Partnership, a film promotion company in London. He is the author of 10 novels, as well as numerous screenplays and the collections of short stories Personal Demons and The Devil in Me.

From Puerto Rico to mythological forests, The Palace charts a family's journey to build a life and home in a world that is often violent and rife with economic instability, as the speaker must also confront his own turbulent past and strive to imagine new ways forward.

Amidst real and imagined landscapes the narrator confronts the specters of his ancestors and ancient gods as the family traverses torn villas and labyrinths. Despite a turbulent history scarred by violence, disenfranchisement, and addiction, a path emerges toward redemption through the speaker's deep engagement with love and the natural world. Still, throughout the speaker grapples with his understanding of change: what can we, and what can't we expect to leave behind in life? What does it mean to move on, to grow?

Marked by solitude and inquisition, the poems of The Palace note the physical nature of their existence as a vehicle for exploring the spiritual. Featuring recurring motifs of the labyrinth, addiction, fecundity, fragility, and future, Cerpa evokes the sense that one can move on from an environment or way of being in the world, but never from oneself. The Palace is a testament of love and transformation, a journey toward splendor in a despairing world.

In poems born of intense loneliness, grief, anger, and uncertainty at a convergence of apocalypses: a raging pandemic, a worsening climate crisis, and numerous global uprisings, Ally Ang’s Let the Moon Wobble asks and seeks to answer the question: What makes the end of the world worth surviving?

Let the Moon Wobble considers multiple speakers’ journeys through the COVID-19 pandemic, the climate crisis, and the rise of fascism. With humor, lyricism, and endearing absurdity, Ang uses varied forms and poetic traditions to process feelings of helplessness and uncertainty. These poems ache for connection and lineage in a time of unrelenting isolation, plumbing the depths of grief and rage against the systems and institutions that aim to repress and kill queer people of color.

Coursing through Let the Moon Wobble is the deep desire for wildness, freedom from convention and constraint, and to be seen. The speaker refuses erasure, often taking up so much space that they're impossible to ignore. Ultimately, we arrive at a place of hope and possibility where what's "freshly broken" can give way to blooming. Ang's debut is a testament to the ways queer joy and community can fuel resistance and allow us to imagine radical new ways of being.

In Man Hating Psycho, Iphgenia Baal deftly identifies the unexpected humor, absurdism, and surreality of online encounters, demonstrating how the indifferent depravity that rules the internet has spilled over into our everyday, face-to-face interactions. In these stories, set among the uncertainty of post-Brexit London, the horror of the Grenfell Tower tragedy, and the confusion of the Covid-19 pandemic, young people stage rooftop confessions, group shows, and bowling-alley brawls, fumbling toward a hazy sense of self-knowledge in a world growing increasingly unfamiliar. 

These stories meander like late-night conversations toward moments of unexpected vulnerability and depravity. In “Pain in the Neck,” a woman’s misguided act of generosity toward an old friend leads to one of the worst nights of her life. A group of teenagers in “Pro Life” disintegrates over a shocking secret that proves their inability to see one another clearly. And in “Destination Wedding,” a privileged acquaintance’s preening social media posts send a new mother into a spiral of loathing. Provocative, hilarious, and startlingly original, this collection distinguishes Baal as one of the most resolute and daring voices in contemporary literature.

Following three characters eager to find their place in the world, The Origin of Ava explores the healing that happens in life after loss. 

Ava Waters has everything under control. She is a rising star in the world of ornithology, a respected professor, and comfortably in love with a fellow academic whose research interests overlap with her own. But when her father and star student both die on the same day, Ava abandons everything and everyone she has ever known and retreats to her uncle’s birding casa in Ecuador.

Meanwhile in the wilderness of western Idaho, Greer Groff is eleven years old and on the run. The only witness to an act of shocking violence, she must survive on her own using her wits, imagination, and the countless hours she spent listening to an old friend's mystical forest stories to guide her way. 

Also longing for a better life, "convicted fellow" Ezra Fossman may have served his time, but he’s done waiting for freedom. He jumps parole on a container ship bound for Central America, willing to leave everything behind to escape a future defined by his past.

Subtly suffused with myth and with stories woven together by ravens, The Origin of Ava takes us from the Pacific Northwest to the Galapagos and back again. Annie Lampman has written a timeless and timely reminder that however hard we try to break with the past, we may just be setting up a collision course with our truest selves.