Our Most Anticipated Queer Books for February 2026

I gotta be real honest: Working on this list this month was complicated by the fact that I also read “List and Shout,” Lydia Kiesling’s excellent essay in The Baffler on the “anticipated book list economy” and the decline in spaces for real, rigorous literary criticism. Riese featured the essay in her Things I Read That I Loved column last week, and I too read and loved the piece, but it also made me feel so sad and bitter about the fact that I so rarely have the time to review books these days and that when I do, very very few people read them. I didn’t get into the book review business for the clicks, that’s for sure, but it’s hard to justify spending so much time and energy on reviews when book lists remain the most popular part of the Autostraddle Literature vertical by a landslide. I certainly understand the usefulness of these monthly anticipated lists we do for queer and trans authors (publishers tend to give way too much weight to them, pressuring authors to feel like they need to make as many lists as possible). And I suppose I understand the usefulness of this list as a resource for readers, too. Surely if you are a regular reader of these lists, we have at some point informed you of a book or writer you did not previously know about who you then checked out and liked. That’s incredible! I love that!

As I’m sure is obvious, we have not actually read the vast majority of the books on these lists, and that makes it both difficult to actually discern the quality and also how queer some of the work is. Where book reviews feel expansive and meaty, anticipated lists feel hollow. It doesn’t help that I’ve noticed publishing copy is…getting worse. Everyone wants to make comps to buzzy movies or shows or strange comp math equations like “it’s Severance meets Cinderella!” I’m not sure if publishers are using AI or underpaid labor or some combination of both when it comes to some of this marketing copy. (Not all of it is bad! I’ve just been noticing a trend where the good jacket copy is getting more rare.) Regardless, no brief description of a book will ever be as satisfying as a critical deep dive. “Anticipation” is such a broad and vague state and we really just are going off of vibes here (and, in some cases, our familiarity with the author’s previous work). We do try to include a wide range of books, but again, we’re so limited in what we can actually write about them. It’s hard to make these lists, and it can often feel tedious. There are only so many ways I can say “sounds intriguing!”

Still, I want to support as many queer and trans authors as possible. And I want to inform readers, too. And I know these lists can serve those functions ultimately. But Like Kiesling, I’m deeply skeptical of the systems that make it so these book lists carry outsized weight in the publishing world and crowd out real literary criticism. I want more time to write book reviews, and I want more people to read them.

But here is our February 2026 list! Made with love and care and enthusiastic passion for queer literature by Riese and me (Kayla).

The author of Sunburn is back with this special expanded U.S. release of its followup, which is about a pair of siblings moving to the Irish town of Ballycrea in 1965, hiding secrets. A wealthy couple takes the siblings under their wing, but one of the sisters gets very close with the wife. It’s being comped to Our Wives Under the Sea, but I’m also sensing some touches of Mrs. S.

New Lauren Groff this month! NEW LAUREN GROFF THIS MONTH! While not all the stories here are explicitly queer, there are a couple excellent queer ones. And regardless of how much queer content there is, Groff’s writing on family dynamics, friendships, motherhood, and women’s complex and messy interior and public lives is one of my personal top anticipated books of the month. I love Groff’s work, but especially her short fiction. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Read more short fiction!

A book that feels deeply connected to the current political moment, Citizenship combines personal narrative, cultural writing, historical accounts, and sociopolitical analysis in its attempts to define and complicate the construction of citizenship. Hernández writes on her own Cuban and Colombian family histories in her explorations of citizenship and immigration.

From Feminist Press comes this work of memoir and mythography about a Black trans man investigating his own queer and trans journey, relationship to family, autonomy, self-discovery, and future. The author investigates bodies and desire and more in this book that feels spiritually connected to Audre Lorde’s Zami (which is also getting a re-release this month, detailed below.

And now enjoy the rest of our most anticipated LGBTQ books for February 2026!

April Evans life is a mess, so she jumps at the chance to teach summer art classes at the town’s new resort — only to find that her new freshly heartbroken roommate, Daphne, is the woman her ex-fiancée left her for three years ago. Daphne’s got no idea who April is, but April hates her on sight. If only they weren’t still somehow so inexplicably drawn to each other…

Charlotte’s back in her Vermont hometown to solve the 30-year-old mystery of her mother’s disappearance. Marin’s new in town, teaching at the University after leaving her husband, job and home behind to start over and is shocked to see Charlotte there —the woman she had a chance encounter with two years earlier on a tragic day that changed Marin’s life forever. But now they’ve got a new opportunity to change each other’s lives…romantically.

Trans author Petra Lord pens a trans fantasy novel about a girl fighting for her life at a prestigious magical academy.

Mal is a fat, queer, broke person with ADHD eager to finish up their senior year editing the school lit mag and then getting out of her small midwestern town. But her malaise is shattered by Emerson, who has big zine dreams, playful banter and so many good bad jokes.

Protagonist Penny is haunted by the voice of her dead abusive father, causing violent intrusive thoughts that send her to Camp Whitewood, a therapy program in the woods. One of the other girls at the program goes missing, and soon it’s clear they’re being hunted by a monster. Supposedly, there are some Yellowjackets vibes!

This cozy romantasy sounds like it’s for fans of fairytales who are always hoping the fairies will be gay.

Sofia hopes learning to cook as good as her grandmother did will pull her mother out of grief and back into her life. Anna Marie, a disciplined whiz in the kitchen, steps in to help transform Sofia’s middling skills, but soon their relationship becomes something more.

A new special hardcover edition of Lorde’s brilliant, genre-bending Zami is hitting shelves this month.

Combining cultural and personal writing, this is a new a promising entry into the canon of kink studies.

A queer fantasy tale of REVENGE! Two teens must battle each other in a magical duel!! But what if they also FALL IN LOVE?

This is the English debut of a Swedish poet, and the collection is described as a “domestic autistic ethnography.”

In the ‘90s, Paloma was chasing rock-and-roll stardom and her girlfriend and manager, Jace, was committed to making her dreams come true. Two decades after Paloma vanished from the public eye in 2001, Jade needs Paloma back to save a club that meant so much to them both. A tribute to Detroit’s garage band scene and a sapphic love story about second chances.

In the early 1900s, a young gardener falls for her employer, the enigmatic Lady Arabella Lascy who is obsessed with what she believes to be a curse that killed off her whole family and is coming for her next. A gay gardener period tale…sounds like it could be for fans of The Haunting of Bly Manor!

After breaking her secluded, emotionally uncomplicated life for a one-night stand with pink-haired vet tech Josie, Colby is ready to move on — but the Minnesota blizzard has other plans for them in this forced proximity sapphic romance.

Here we have a nonbinary and queer remix of The Picture of Dorian Gray. It’s part of a series in which marginalized authors pen retellings of literary classics with queer twists on them.

Protagonist Charli has hit a wall in her research project on Romy Haag, the trans disco singer and lover of David Bowie, when she meets androgynous and glamorous Alexander Geist who immediately feels like a soul mate and has her following him to Berlin. The novel sounds like a strange and wild ride in the best way, and I generally like a lot of the fiction work Catapult puts out.

Our protagonist in this sci-fi caper is Malia, a hacker who steps away from the hack life after a massively successful heist. But she gets bored with civilian life and starts dabbling in some underground scenes that have her getting in trouble with a dangerous local gang, the leader of which pressures her into agreeing to bring down a corrupt politician.

The latest installment in Spalding’s delightful “Out in Hollywood series” finds an actress famous for a superhero series eager to prove her acting chops onstage —but when a scandal forces out the acclaimed director tied to the project, he’s replaced by the hip, buzzy, Rebecca Frisch. Now Tess must balance her guilt over breaking Rebecca’s heart over a decade ago with her still-simmering attraction and the reality of her closeted, A-list life.

On a class trip to Greece, Natalie falls for her Greek instructor’s daughter, Melanie, but that OCD diagnosis she’s chosen to ignore threatens to manifest itself in Natalie overthinking herself out of a blissful summer romance.

I am a sucker for any and all queer ice skating content (from Spinning by Tillie Walden to some of the real-life queer figure skaters I follow on social media), so I am delighted to hear about this illustrated book about young skating rivals Lydia Chen and Elaine Yee who are competing for Olympic team spots and who are also very drawn to one another.

Want to shout out a book we didn’t feature? Tell us all about it in the comments!