Books to read with Pride: as recommended by LGBTQ+ bookshops
Pride month is the perfect time to read the rainbow!
If you're looking for inspiration, what better place to seek recommendations than from the kaleidoscope of independent LGBTQ+ bookshops up and down the country?
Discover fabulous literary fiction, poignant memoir, ravishing romance, graphic novels and more... plus, add new independents to your bookshop bucket list to visit this Pride month and beyond.
Gay on Wye
Gay on Wye is a pioneering LGBTQ+ bookstore that is dedicated to celebrating the richness and diversity of LGBTQ+ literature, providing a safe and welcoming space for readers of all backgrounds.
Gay on Wye strives to create a warm, accepting environment where everyone feels comfortable exploring and discussing LGBTQ+ narratives. Our passionate staff are here to provide personalised recommendations, foster meaningful conversations, and connect readers with stories that reflect their identities.
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Gay on Wye recommends...
Scorched Grace by Margot Douaihy
Join Sister Holiday, a chain-smoking, tattooed, gold-toothed lesbian nun as she fights for answers over a deepening mystery.
To solve this high-stakes mystery, Sister Holiday will have to reckon with the sins of her chequered past. Her investigation leads down a twisty path of suspicion and secrets in the sticky, oppressive New Orleans heat, turning her against colleagues, students, and even fellow Sisters along the way.
Gay's The Word
Gay's The Word is the UK's oldest LGBT bookshop and a touchstone for the broader LGBT community. The bookshop was set up in January 1979 by a group of gay socialists as a community space where all profits were funnelled back into the business. This ethos continues today with shelves bursting with books and the space used for book and community events.
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Gay's The Word recommends...
Nova Scotia House by Charlie Porter
Nova Scotia House is about Johnny who is 19 and Jerry, 45. It is about youth and age...it’s about HIV and AIDS. It is about discovery and love and experience and the passing on of wisdom. It is about interiority and intimacy; interior selves nurtured into the light of self-understanding through the verve of intergenerational queer connection. It is about belonging and loss, housing and urban space, sex and gardening, desire and inequality. Nova Scotia House is an ode to the majesty of the marginalised. We hope you cherish reading it. We certainly did.
Lighthouse - Edinburgh's Radical Bookshop
Lighthouse is a queer-owned and woman-led independent community bookshop. They are an unapologetically activist, intersectional, feminist, antiracist, LGBTQ+ community space. In 2020 they were nominated Scotland’s Best Independent Bookshop!
Lighthouse celebrates diversity of thought and expression, championing voices from the margins.
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Lighthouse recommends...
Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman by N.S. Nuseibeh
Namesake is clear eyed and curious, guiding readers through the streets and checkpoints of occupied Palestine, to breakfast tables heaped with food and history, into family dynamics and institutions of privilege, through an Arab feminism built on the legacies of Muslim women – warriors and worriers. It is a gift; tender and fierce in equal measure, devastating in the humanity it holds at a time when the authors people face genocide. Nuseibeh's writing wears her queerness lightly, woven into an outsider's perspective on bodies and being, illness and conversion and so much more.
Namesake: Reflections on a Warrior Woman is the winner of the 2025 Jhalak Prose Prize.
A Place of Our Own : Six Spaces That Shaped Queer Women's Culture by June Thomas
June Thomas' charm leaps off the page – warm and earnest and inquisitive, she offers us a cultural history of queer women's lives that beautifully illustrates the ways in women build and shape the spaces they need and are built and shaped by them in return. From feminist sex shops to bookshops, lesbian communes to holiday escapes, the 70s/80s/90s seeds of queer community and feminist business have so much to teach us and find comfort in.
Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation by Juliana Gleeson
Gleeson's Hermaphrodite Logic: A History of Intersex Liberation is bold and rigorous and frankly eye opening. As manufactured social panic about trans lives bleeds into courtrooms and parliamentary halls, it is more important that ever to understand the landscape of queer liberation past and present, with intersex voices at their heart. Philosophical and forthright, a blend of testimony and polemic, it's a book to galvanise and radicalise.
The Common Press
The Common Press CIC is a not-for-profit queer bookshop that means a lot of things to the community. They are a radical and independent space that champions books by authors from a wide range of marginalised backgrounds.
Whether you're looking for the latest novels by your favorite gay, lesbian, queer, trans, and non-binary authors; seminal works of Black history; fourth-wave feminist theory; or that niche book on disability activism, they either have it or know how to get it fast. They also stock poetry, plays, graphic novels, and a great collection of books for children and young adults. And if, after all that browsing, you're feeling a bit tired, they make a pretty great coffee and cuppa as well.
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The Common Press recommends...
Females by Andrea Long Chu
Females is a book that, when I first read it in 2019, I knew was designed to provoke. Deliberately inverting the conventions of existing gender theory, Andrea Long Chu starts with a confrontation – 'Everyone is female, and everyone hates it' – and lets the rest of her tract (manifesto feels too strong a word) follow from there.
Perhaps tellingly, the SCUM Manifesto's very own Valerie Solans is used as a leading light to dictate the direction of Long Chu's enquiries. Critically hounded since its publication with doubts as to its sincerity or coherence, this republication of Females ends with an afterword from the now-Pulitzer Prize-winning Long Chu, reflecting upon her original intentions in writing the book, and positioning it within today's ever more hostile landscape of gender and cultural politics. It's this afterword that makes me most excited to think about the book with readers at Common Press - whatever one makes of Females itself, it is a book that forces you to re-examine the security of your own convictions, and to think a little harder about what constitutes your own identity.
The Old Queeriosity Shop
Based in Plymouth, The Old Queeriosity Shop is a queer-run bookshop specialising in LGBTQIA+ literature - both fiction and non-fiction, poetry and children's.
The Old Queeriosity Shop aims to be not only a bookstore, but a community hub that is able to provide a safe space where members and allies of the LGBTQIA+ community can gather, and be a place that welcomes all with open arms.
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The Old Queeriosity Shop recommends...
Magical Boy by The Kao
A cute series about a trans guy dealing with responsibility he didn’t ask for whilst navigating his identity and family life. There are some difficult topics that are handled sensitively and with care, making this a light read. The main character, Max, and his friends are a joy to read.
Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne
Book 1 in a fantastic sapphic cosy fantasy series. Reyna and Kianthe leave their old lives behind to start a new life together, opening a bookshop/café combo – but things don’t quite go as planned. Chock full of found family and puns. And Dragons.
Bury Your Gays by Chuck Tingle
This is hard book to describe, but at its core it’s a love letter to the community. Chuck manages to combine horror, social commentary, and genuine care in a way that just works. His works are well worth checking out!
One Last Song by Nathan Evans
Older protagonists often get overlooked in queer fiction – so One Last Song is a refreshing change of pace. The deuteragonists, Joan and Jim, live in a care home and are both in their 80s! It’s a story about finding love in later life, but also a look back on how far things have come since the start of the fight for queer liberation.
The Portal Bookshop
The Portal Bookshop is a queer bookshop and café in the heart of York. They specialise in LGBTQ+ everything, diverse sci-fi and fantasy. Queer resistance. Always trying to help.
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The Portal Bookshop recommends...
I Hope We Choose Love: A Trans Girl's Notes From The End Of The World by Kai Cheng Thom
This collection of essays was an instant 5-star read for me. Gorgeously written, unflinching about the struggles facing the LGBT+ community as a whole and trans people in particular, but hopeful and inspiring. Left me feeling fired up and full of determined optimism. Read this and help us make the world better!
The Queery
The Queery is a co-op in Brighton, UK, owned and run by its members, whose main focus is the benefit of the local queer community. It’s run in as non-hierarchical a way as possible by different collectives of volunteers, with solidarity at its heart. A space for queers, by queers.
The Queery is a wheelchair-accessible sober space that’s home to a radical queer bookstore and merch shop, a small library, a small vegan pay-as-you-feel café, and available for workshops, talks, classes, meetings, support groups, open mics, film nights and more!
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The Queery recommends...
Lie with Me by Philippe Besson
Besson, by retelling his own experiences, is able to not only educate us on what it’s like growing up as a gay man in 80s Italy – but display what is at stake if we do not embrace our queer identities.
Riley Weaver Needs a Date to the Gaybutante Ball by Jason June
June breaks down stereotypes and represents femme presenting gays, writing on queer love and acceptance.
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