The Best Queer Fiction Since 2000, According to Kirkus

We the Animals is a coming-of-age novella about three brothers in upstate New York (published in 2011). The family struggles with poverty and violence. Their Puerto Rican father has trouble holding down a job, and their white mother works the graveyard shift. The brothers are mostly left on their own and allowed to run wild. Told in the first person plural, the book consists of a series of vignettes that show the brothers, especially the youngest, begin to enter the larger world, grappling with race, sexuality, and moving away from family bonds. —Rebecca Hussey

This 2019 novel is told in the form of a letter from Little Dog, a young gay Vietnamese American, to his mother, who is illiterate. Vuong is a poet, so this is a beautifully written work. Book Riot writer Anne Mai Yee Jansen says, “The letters are lyrical and poignant, tracing connections across generations. It’s largely about the narrator’s queer sexuality and general outsiderness as a young Vietnamese American in a largely white community. It’s about love and loss, grief and family, colonialism and race. And it’s pretty much everything you might dream of in an epistolary novel by a poet.”

I like to think of this book as a love story without a happily ever after. Mike and Benson love each other, but they aren’t sure if they want to stay together, and the issue comes to a head when Mike flies to Japan to spend time with his dying father, just as his mother arrives in Houston for a visit. It’s a bittersweet book full of characters in hard situations, doing their best — or trying to. —Laura Sackton

Sue Trinder is a 17-year-old pickpocket (a “fingersmith” in the slang of Victorian England) raised by a woman who steals, buys, and sells babies in a house of thieves that feels straight out of Oliver Twist. When a dashing con man she knows only as Gentleman rolls into town one day with a proposition that promises to make Sue rich, she agrees to follow him to the countryside and help him seduce an innocent and wealthy young woman. But of course, things don’t go as planned, and the con you know about is never the only con. This story has crossing and double-crossing and triple-crossing, secrets layered upon secrets, villains, madwomen, and continuous revelations that will keep you turning the pages. Waters unravels the plot with gorgeous writing and masterful shifts in narrative voice that make Fingersmith the very best kind of literary thriller. I kept sitting down to read a chapter and looking up a hundred pages later, wondering where the time had gone. —Rebecca Joines Schinsky

While the material in A Little Life is heart-wrenching, I was so invested in learning more about the central character’s past that I often sat down to read a chapter and ended up reading 100 pages in a gulp. While the narrative focuses on four friends—Jude, Willem, Malcolm, and J.B.—Jude is undeniably the focus, with much of his life kept just obscure enough (Jude the Obscure?) so that I kept reading to learn more. While this might inspire some ugly crying, it never actually felt to me like it was an eight-hundred-plus page book. —Tiffany D’Abate

As far as I can tell, Jeffrey Eugenides is not intersex. Though he could certainly be like me, perfectly capable of passing as a cisgender man. Perhaps that’s why he wasn’t able to capture living in the body of Cal. Perhaps it was within his capabilities, but it was an artistic choice to keep a little psychic distance. Either way, I’m glad he wrote about it, about the intersex experience. To see something tangential to my own experience on the page, and not just something I wrote, was so meaningful. So important. And it won’t be the last intersex fiction I read. I will search other pages to find that bodily experience represented. —Chris M. Arnone, “Intersex Reading Middlesex“

This graphic novel is painstakingly drawn in ink and hand-lettering to be the composition notebook of young Karen Reyes, a young girl who feels she is a monster. The novel shows 1960s Chicago in its tumult and doesn’t hesitate to dive into dozens of side plots, all equally important: Karen struggles to make friends, and misses her former BFF and childhood love Missy; she befriends young black drag queen Franklin and enjoys the company of Sandy, a ghost; she digs into the story of the Holocaust survivor who was murdered upstairs; she worries about her brother Deeze and her mother. A brilliant graphic novel through and through. —Leah Rachel von Essen