Adult Fiction

Due to the overwhelming success of I Hear the Sunspot, the sequel has finally arrived, I Hear the Sunspot: Theory of Happiness! How will this "more than friends, less than lovers" relationship evolve?

--he can't hear . . . ?

Because of a hearing disability Kohei is often alone. Taichi is outspoken and cheerful. At first, Kohei keeps himself well guarded, but after he meets Taichi he slowly learns to open up.

Dept. of Speculation meets Black Mirror in this lyrical, speculative debut about a queer mother raising her daughter in an unjust surveillance state

In a United States not so unlike our own, the Department of Balance has adopted a radical new form of law enforcement: rather than incarceration, wrongdoers are given a second (and sometimes, third, fourth, and fifth) shadow as a reminder of their crime—and a warning to those they encounter. Within the Department, corruption and prejudice run rampant, giving rise to an underclass of so-called Shadesters who are disenfranchised, publicly shamed, and deprived of civil rights protections.

Kris is a Shadester and a new mother to a baby born with a second shadow of her own. Grieving the loss of her wife and thoroughly unprepared for the reality of raising a child alone, Kris teeters on the edge of collapse, fumbling in a daze of alcohol, shame, and self-loathing. Yet as the kid grows, Kris finds her footing, raising a child whose irrepressible spark cannot be dampened by the harsh realities of the world. She can’t forget her wife, but with time, she can make a new life for herself and the kid, supported by a community of fellow misfits who defy the Department to lift one another up in solidarity and hope.

With a first-person register reminiscent of the fierce self-disclosure of Sheila Heti and the poetic precision of Ocean Vuong, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is a bold debut novel that examines the long shadow of grief, the hard work of parenting, and the power of queer resistance.

Any love story aficionado will say that the key to a successful couple is intense desire for one another-but what if the characters in question are an asexual woman with a passion for Boys Love stories and a gay man whose heart forever belongs to his oblivious childhood friend? Although romance will never be in the cards for newlyweds Yuriko and Gakurouta, the bond blossoming between them promises to be a wonderful relationship-the likes of which neither has ever experienced before…

Any good love story starts at the beginning: Where and how did the lovebirds meet? Was it love at first sight? And most importantly, was there a spark? For Yuriko and Gakurouta, their initial meeting was nothing to write home about―after all, matchmaking services aren’t unheard of. But a chance second encounter on the street revealed that as an asexual woman and gay man, they might have much more in common than they initially assumed. And in that moment, they felt not a spark but something better: the seed of a friendship, ready to take root and bloom.

Any exciting love story has its fair share of misunderstandings and drama―but what is a person to do when they’re unable to tell the truth? As an asexual woman and gay man, Yuriko and Gakurouta are keenly aware that their relationship is rather different from what is considered “normal.” So when confronted with their families’, friends’, and society’s expectations, they struggle to convey the nature of their marriage. Will the newlyweds be able to hold their ground and find their own version of happily ever after?

Ursula K. LeGuin meets The Road in a post-apocalyptic modern classic of female friendship and intimacy.

Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only a vague recollection of their lives before.

As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl—the fortieth prisoner—sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground.

Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.

By: Georgia K. Boone (Author), 2024, Paperback

For fans of The Holiday comes a heartwarming Christmas house-swap rom-com debut in which finding yourself and finding love come hand in hand.

Bee Tyler needs a break. In the bustling San Francisco tech community, no one ever seems to stand still—especially her perfect sister and business partner, Beth. So when her best friend suggests a getaway on the wildly popular house-swap app, Vacate, Bee decides a countryside retreat might be exactly what she needs.

Clover Mills has had a year. Between losing her mother and making the complicated decision to leave her fiancé, sticking around the idyllic Christmas obsessed town of Salem, Ohio, just doesn’t feel right. So when she hears about Vacate, she jumps at the chance to spend the holidays in the unfamiliar city of San Francisco.

Soon enough, Bee is living in Clover’s cozy Salem cottage, and Clover is living in Bee’s sleek San Francisco apartment. As Clover can’t seem to stop running into Bee’s frustratingly gorgeous sister, Beth, and Bee finds herself spending more and more time with Clover’s ultra charming ex-fiancé, Knox, the two women realize that this Christmas they may find just what they were looking for and more…

An epic, intimate novel about an unconventional and irresistible family—from the New York Times bestselling author of In Love, White Houses, and Away

Immigrating alone from Paris to New York after the crucible of World War II, young Gazala becomes friends with two spirited sisters, Anne and Alma. When Gazala’s lost, beloved brother, Samir, joins her in Manhattan, this contentious, inseparable foursome makes their way into the twenty-first century, becoming the beating heart of a multigenerational found family.

The passing years are marked by the business of everyday existence and the inevitable surprises of erupting passions, of great and small waves of joy and despair, from the beginning of life to its end. Gazala and Samir make a home together, Anne leaves her husband for his sister, and Anne’s restless daughter grows up to raise a child on her own and to join a throuple, becoming who she wants to be. Through it all, amid the tumult of these decades, the four friends and their best beloveds stand by one another, protecting, annoying, and celebrating themselves, steadfastly unapologetic about their desires and the unorthodox family they have created. As the next generation falls in and out of love, experiencing triumphs, mistakes and disappointments, the central pillars of their lives are the four indomitable elders they call the “Greats.”

In I’ll Be Right Here, Amy Bloom embraces the complexity and richness of humanity and the lawlessness of love, bringing her trademark voice, wry humor, and compassionate eye to the many, often mysterious ways we live as we love, and hope to be loved in return.

By: William E. Jones (Author), 2019, Paperback

A perverse and explicit new take on the coming of age novel, William E. Jones's I'm Open to Anything explores bohemian Southern California of the late 1980s and early 90s, before gentrification ruined everything. The book's narrator flees a crumbling industrial wasteland in the Midwest and finds himself in sunny Los Angeles without a car, working in a neighborhood video store and spending many hours watching films. He explores his adopted city and befriends a number of men, most of them immigrants, who teach him the finer points of sex. He acquires the skill of fisting, giving his partners intense pleasure, and at the same time hearing the stories of their lives. They too have fled their hometowns: one to escape torture at the hands of a Salvadoran death squad; another to study anthropology after years of wandering and religious questioning. Alternating between explicit scenes of kinky sex and intimate conversations about matters of life and death, I'm Open to Anything is a porno novel of rare ambition and humor. The book recalls Olympia Press's heyday, when authors made quick money churning out dirty books, but couldn't hide the intellectual obsessions that made them writers in the first place.
William E. Jones's previous book, True Homosexual Experiences (also published by We Heard You Like Books), a biography of Straight to Hell's iconoclastic editor Boyd McDonald, celebrates the frank, raunchy language of the first queer 'zine. Jones brings the same unsparing and profane attitude to I'm Open to Anything, his debut novel.

By:  Kosoko Jackson, 2022, Paperback

It’s been months since aspiring journalist Kian Andrews has heard from his ex-boyfriend, Hudson Rivers, but an urgent text has them meeting at a café. Maybe Hudson wants to profusely apologize for the breakup. Or confess his undying love. . . But no, Hudson has a favor to ask—he wants Kian to pretend to be his boyfriend while his parents are in town, and Kian reluctantly agrees.

The dinner doesn’t go exactly as planned, and suddenly Kian is Hudson’s plus one to Georgia’s wedding of the season. Hudson comes from a wealthy family where reputation is everything, and he really can’t afford another mistake. If Kian goes, he’ll help Hudson preserve appearances and get the opportunity to rub shoulders with some of the biggest names in media. This could be the big career break Kian needs.

But their fake relationship is starting to feel like it might be more than a means to an end, and it’s time for both men to fact-check their feelings.

By James Frankie Thomas (Author), 2023, Paperback

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, and obsessed with Fay. The two of them bond fiercely and spend all their waking hours giddily parsing their environment for homoerotic subtext. Then, during rehearsals for the fall play, they notice two sexually ambiguous boys who are potential candidates for their exclusive Invert Society. The pairs become mirrors of one another and drive each other to make choices that they’ll regret for the rest of their lives.

Looking back on these events as adults, the estranged Fay and Nell trace that fateful school year, recalling backstage theater department intrigue, antiwar demonstrations, smutty fanfic written over AIM, a shared dial-up connection—and the spectacular cascade of mistakes, miscommunications, and betrayals that would ultimately tear the two of them apart.

Ms. and Ms. Smith meets The Pairing in this heart-racing romance of secrets, spies, and steam.

A few rules for the international superspy:
(1) Never blow your cover.
(2) Never accept the first plan.
(3) Never fall for anyone at the agency. Especially if she’s your ex-girlfriend.

Yardley Whitmer, code name “the Unicorn,” can do no wrong. She’s honed her spycraft and become an instant legend in the field. If only breaking up with her girlfriend were as easy as rappelling off the Eiffel Tower. Living a full-time cover story has slowly eroded her relationship until there’s nothing left but lies.

KC “Tabasco” Nolan, hacker extraordinaire, can crack any code―except the one that would tell her the right moment to confess her secret job to Yardley. Now it’s too late, and she’s in danger of losing the best chance at love she’s ever had.

When an undercover shakedown goes wrong, Yardley and KC discover the unbelievable truth―that they’ve both been working at the agency for years. To salvage the mission, they partner up and fly across oceans, race through winding European streets, and give in to inconvenient passion while hiding in an ambassador’s linen closet. But can they throw away their rules and fight through their secrets to fall in love with each other’s true selves?

When a young girl goes missing, the ghosts of the past collide with her family’s secrets in a mesmerizing Native American Southern Gothic

When six-year-old Laurel Taylor vanishes without a trace, her family is left shattered, struggling to navigate the darkness of grief and unanswered questions. As their search turns to despair, Laurel’s older sister, Nadine, begins experiencing nightmares that blur the line between dream and reality, and she becomes convinced that Laurel’s disappearance could be connected to other family tragedies. Guided by her elders, Nadine sets out to uncover whether laying the ghosts to rest is the key to finding her sister and healing her fractured family.

Carson Faust captivates in this chilling literary debut that confronts the specter of colonization and the generational scars it leaves on Native American families. Steeped in Indigenous folklore and drawing from the author’s own family history, If the Dead Belong Here examines what it means to be haunted—both by the supernatural and by terrors of our own making. Faust crafts a powerful, kaleidoscopic tale about the complicated legacies of violence that shape our present, the importance of honoring our past, and the resilience of a family—and a people—determined to heal from old wounds.

Featuring scarlet sprayed edges

“Much like Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, M. L. Rio’s sparkling debut is a richly layered story of love, friendship, and obsession...will keep you riveted through its final, electrifying moments.”
―Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, New York Times bestselling author of The Nest

"Nerdily (and winningly) in love with Shakespeare…Readable, smart.”
―New York Times Book Review

On the day Oliver Marks is released from jail, the man who put him there is waiting at the door. Detective Colborne wants to know the truth, and after ten years, Oliver is finally ready to tell it.

A decade ago: Oliver is one of seven young Shakespearean actors at Dellecher Classical Conservatory, a place of keen ambition and fierce competition. In this secluded world of firelight and leather-bound books, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingénue, extras.

But in their fourth and final year, good-natured rivalries turn ugly, and on opening night real violence invades the students’ world of make-believe. In the morning, the fourth-years find themselves facing their very own tragedy, and their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, each other, and themselves that they are innocent.

If We Were Villains, now available with beautiful stained edges, was named one of Bustle's Best Thriller Novels of the Year, and Mystery Scene says, "A well-written and gripping ode to the stage...A fascinating, unorthodox take on rivalry, friendship, and truth."

From the author of the international bestseller Lie with Me comes the tale of an affair between an aristocratic teenager and a soldier, as they discover the possibilities and perils of first love.

Summer, 1916. With German Zeppelins on the skyline, the men of Paris are off at war. For Vincent, sixteen and still too young to fight, this moment of dread is also a moment of possibility. An electrifying encounter with Marcel, an enigmatic middle-aged writer, draws Vincent’s desires out into the light. As he’s taken under Marcel’s wing, Vincent begins a dangerous affair with Arthur, the son of his governess and a young soldier on leave. Together, they share a secret that everyone seems to know and yet everyone remains silent about.

In this stunning portrait of young love, Philippe Besson depicts a young man who plays by his own rules and is not afraid of who he is. In the afternoons, Vincent is mentored by Marcel, the great novelist, in the city’s opulent cafés as they draw the judgment of society. And at night, he hides Arthur in his bedroom as the two risk everything to be together. Their affair initiates them into a world of pleasure and shields them from the encroaching war. During this magical week away from the trenches, Vincent shelters Arthur with happiness, reassuring him, “Nothing will happen to you.”

Tender and harrowing, In the Absence of Men captures how exhilarating and heart-crushing it is to fall in love for the first time. Besson’s award-winning novel “beautifully captures the romance and amorality of gilded youth” (The Independent).