Our Most Anticipated Queer Books for April 2026

I adore so many of the authors with new queer books out this month! From a grocery co-op drama to a cheeky pop star saga to a linked story collection centering fat queer characters to a trans neo-noir, our top picks for the month are a constellation of queer literary brilliance.

If we missed something you’re looking forward to this month, please shout it out in the comments! It remains a truly wonderful “problem” that there are more and more LGBTQ+ releases every month, which means things sometimes slip through the cracks! But tell us about more books! We love to hear about them! May our gay TBR piles forever grow!

Ohhhh I’m so hype for this lesbian grocery co-op novel (!!) from Jules Wernersbach, who also owns the great queer bookstore Hive Mind Books in Brooklyn! The novel, steeped in themes of labor, class, and unionization, is centered on Guadalupe Street Co-Op in Austin, Texas. Forty years after girlfriends Eleanor and Meg founded the worker-owned/customer-owned grocery store, store senior manager Roz doesn’t notice her girlfriend Molly is working to unionize her co-workers and also embedded in a relationship with collective comrade Randy, the dairy manager. It’s all set in one week, during peak Texas hurricane season. Stay tuned for a full review here on Autostraddle.

Award-winning memoirist and poet Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha pens a new poetry collection (their fifth!), which was written over five years of pandemic lockdown. During that time, they lost a lot of friends and comrades and their estranged parents came to their end of life, these intersecting losses and griefs explored in these poems, which as with all of their work, center disabled QTBIPOC lived experiences.

This novel was originally published in France in 2000 and is now being released with a new English translation here in the U.S. It’s set in the 1990s queer Parisian rave scene and follows Louise, a DJ in her early-thirties. Lesbian drama abounds. It sounds like Parisian The L Word rendered in prose, and I must get my hands on it.

In this strange literary thriller, Naomi and Laura meet by random encounter when Naomi accidentally takes Laura’s coat while they’re both at a department store cafe. They fall for each other and move in together, but something is off about Laura, who seems to have no real life beyond their relationship. Then Laura starts changing her appearance to look more like Naomi. Nearby, a nameless woman working for a ghostwriter by transcribing his recordings hears a mysterious message on said recordings addressed to her that throws her entire life off track. It’s about obsession, deception, and the uncanny — all themes I’m deeply interested in.

A speculative novel steeped in Korean folklore, Aviary follows 19-year-old undocumented immigrant Hee-Jin who thinks the police have come to her door to deport her to North Korea but instead finds a disfigured bird-like corpse on her doorstep that has her eyes. It’s her younger sister Hee-Young, who was supposed to be at an art program in America but is instead here, dead of a strange overdose. In her pocket is a plane ticket and U.S. passport, so Hee-Jin assumes her sister’s identity and takes her place in an effort to find out what happened to her. Queer longing, feminist rage, body horror, and gothic intrigue ensue.

ANNA DORN HIVE, RISE!!!! Dorn — the poet laureate of writing unlikable lesbians — is back with the story of 38-year-old pop star Blue Velour, whose seventh album referencing the subreddit dedicated to unpacking her supposed secret relationship with her longtime producer Sasha Harlow finally gets her the critical acclaim she’s been working toward her entire career. As a result, she hires her superfan Rose Lutz as an assistant to help manage her upcoming tour…which ends up canceled due to the pandemic. So, Blue and Sasha take to the woods to make another album, bringing fangirl Rose along. The songwriting retreat ends up taking a perilous turn. With Dorn at the helm, there’ll be plenty of humor along the way.

Adding to the canon of trans theory, Nonbinary Life combines theory and memoir to critique the gender binary and overreliance on gender as a framework and imagine other possibilities. It explores pronouns, masculinity, love, family, and language. What does it mean to truly live beyond the binary? This book drives toward that question.

Patrick Cottrell is back! I’ve been anticipating this novel since the second I heard of it! It’s about trans guy Dan Moran, published author of the autofictional novel Sorry to Disrupt the Peace (for those of you newer to Patrick’s work, that’s the title of his first novel, too). Five years after the death of his youngest brother, Dan is teaching fiction in Brooklyn and working on writing a psychological thriller when an enveloped addressed to the wrong name shows up and includes a childhood photo of his dead brother, prompting Dan to return to his childhood home, which surprises his estranged family. He play-acts at detective, driving around town in his brother’s Honda Accord and tracking down leads.

Fun fact: Early in my relationship with my wife Kristen, she sent me a short story written by Emma Copley Eisenberg. That story was called “Fat Swim” and I can still remember the lively discussion my then-girlfriend and I had about it at the time, one of the first of many conversations about queer short fiction we love to come. Now, I’m lucky to call Kristen my wife and also lucky to call Emma a friend. I am so thrilled to celebrate the publication of her linked short story collection Fat Swim, which includes the titular story as well as more narratives about characters exploring queerness, bodies, fatness, sex, power, and more. Stay tuned for a full review here on Autostraddle.

And now enjoy the rest of the books we’re looking forward to this month!

This is probably a sweet read to buy for the young theater kid in your life, about a girl who moves from Austin to Rhode Island and gets cast in the 8th grade musical. It’s about being possibly in love with your best friend, crushes, and coming out.

Anything put out by Little Puss Press is going to be great, mark my words. You’ll find “trailer-trash divas” and “Discord autistics,” among other delightfully rendered queer and trans characters, in the pages of this debut poetry collection.

Set in a world two years after monstrous beings tore through Britain, We Call Them Witches follows Sara and her family trying to survive in the post-apocalyptic thick of it. A strange girl named Parsley shows up, and while she shouldn’t be trusted, Sara is drawn to her anyway and seeks her help when Sara’s brother is taken by witches.

Here’s a standalone dystopian fantasy about an assassin with outlawed magical abilities trying to get back her kidnapped sisters, “perfect for fans of Arcane and Iron Widow,” according to the publisher.

Mr. Darcy’s sister gets her turn at a happily ever after in this queer take on a Pride and Prejudice sequel.

Big Freedia, Vockah Redu, and other queer Black artists and performers used performance to process and create community in post-Katrina New Orleans, and Alix Chapman conducts an ethnography of these efforts. “Raising the Bottom shows how black queer artists address, remix, and redirect stereotypes to amplify community power, pleasure, and solidarity,” the publisher writes.

An autistic teen sets out to create a Pride celebration free of the sensory overload that excludes people like her and finds valuable, transformative queer friendships along the way.

Hazel’s twin abandons her at a party, disappears, and then shows up a day later disoriented and claiming to be Veronica Woods — the girl at the center of their rural town lore after being murdered in the woods many years ago. Hazel’s gotta solve the mystery of Veronica’s murder if she’s got any hope of saving her twin in this queer story of a party trick gone dangerously wrong.

There are several LGBTQ+ characters in this YA novel, which uses a trans lens to explore a time-loop sci-fi premise.

Protagonist Hannah has aspirations of becoming a painter but finds herself dropping out of art school and moving into a flophouse where she’s roped into singing in a horror-punk band after breaking up with her girlfriend. A punk coming-of-age tale.

This enemies-to-lovers romance finds  rival tennis stars, both battling their own career and personal demons, make a deal to help each other’s game that requires them to spend an awful lot of time together.

A queer a cozy romantasy that also promises some spice, The Impossible Garden of Clara follows its titular gardener who magically grows herbs and vegetables and is trying to write a book when she’s tasked with an impossible quest.

This queer Black fantasy tale has mermaids, pirates, disability rep, and an adventure tale backed by original mythology.

Well let’s keep the queer mermaid adventure vibes going with this dark fantasy reimagining of The Little Mermaid!

From the author of The Feminist Killjoy Handbook comes a text arguing for the power of refusal. I’m reminded of Stef Rubino’s brilliant historical essay, “What If We Just Say No.”

An enemies-to-lovers romance set at a weeklong wedding extravaganza that finds Isabella Valdes shocked to be sharing a cabin with Valentina, her former friend turned rival who ruined her quinceañera. But they each have something the other needs — and soon begin to wonder if they might actually just need each other.

Several historical figures and artists from throughout time appear in these poems, including an exploration of the lustful letters between Virginia Woolf and Vita Sackville-West.

If you are amongst the queers who experienced self-discovery when you first saw the feature film Labyrinth, then this deep dive into the 1986 Bowie-starring masterpiece is for you!

This poetry collection explores healing from sexual trauma, tracing a history of feminist resistance to rape culture from the 1980s up to the impact of the #MeToo movement and making space for queerness in its contemplations of what it means to be a survivor.

Dolly joined the cast of Wedded Bliss to give her influencer career a boost. Carys is there for love, hoping that veterinarian Patrick could end her bad luck streak in romance. Both are surprised to find something else on set altogether: chemistry with each other.

Queer horror and queer YA lovers (and more specifically, people at the center of that Venn diagram) can dive into this anthology comprising 22 young adult horror stories written through an LGBTQ+ lens.

Mycological body horror covers this horror novel about protagonist Nicole, who has been forbidden from leaving her house until marriage. Her mother’s rules are strict and lessons are a warning: The mushrooms that cover the women in her village are grotesque and dangerous and she must do everything to ensure she does not succumb to them. Upon marriage, she moves to an empty mansion with her husband, falling into an entanglement with another trapped wife.

Next week, you can read a full review of this trans film theory book, which crucially expands LGBTQ+ film scholarship, looking specifically at films, TV shows, videos, and web series directed by trans people.

At the age of 47, Lucy Richard leaves her academic life behind to manage her father’s goat farm in rural Massachusetts. Her husband Michael, in declining health, comes along reluctantly. Lucy seeks solace in Sandy, a friend from her girlhood who then becomes more than that. Amid it all, the solar energy company Sandy works for begins eyeing the farm.

Black, queer, nonbinary, disabled femme sex educator Ericka Hart reimagines what sex ed can and should be, “breaking down the ways that social implications keep us from experiencing pleasure, particularly for marginalized communities across race, gender, sexuality, and ability, and how we can dismantle these oppressive myths.”

Travel writer and biographer Sara Wheeler unspools the life of Jan Morris, the famous 1950s journalist who transitioned in the 1970s.

Taking place over three holidays, Million Dollar Marriage is about Elsie, on the precipice of divorce from Petra. But Elsie convinces Petra to pretend to remain happily married to her after Elsie’s grandmother cuts Elsie’s brother out of her will for getting divorced. All Petra has to do is fake it through some family holidays to split the inheritance with Elsie.

An enemies-to-lovers romance ensues when a romance-only bookstore owner crosses paths with a brutally honest book blogger who is anti-romance novels.

After Saylor breaks her arm at basketball camp, distracted by her mom going viral for a video about Saylor’s coming out, her summer plans suddenly switch up and she finds herself entangled with Heaven, who needs Saylor’s help growing her social media presence so she can launch her tattoo artist career one day. Opposites attract in this queer YA romance.

Here we’ve got more enemies-to-lovers hijinks as a lost princess and a changeling encounter during a fey scheme.

More enemies-to-lovers! But in this case, there’s also a second-chance romance twist via an arc that’s friends to enemies to lovers…to enemies to lovers, seemingly? Characters Lena and Andy have a long and sordid history, first as friends, then as ex-friends in fifth grade, into enemies over the next six years. But Andy kissed Lena a couple times just before they left for college, and now 12 years later, they’re back in each other’s orbits for several weeks due to some family drama.

Complex portrayals of gender, sexuality, trauma, and survival sit inside these short stories about characters at the margins of rural New Mexico.

Expect poems as playful and as gay as the title of this collection, which explores art, politics, domestic life, gardening, recovery, the weather, and yes, dinosaurs.

Getting older doesn’t always mean getting more mature — and despite her wife, three kids and (obviously) flock of chickens, Jess is confident she hasn’t lost the vestiges of her awkward twenties. From pranking her surgeon brother before he scrubs in to escaping a Mormon resort on her first adult vacation, the author of A Product of Genetics (and Day Drinking) delivers laughs and apparently even life lessons.

Set in London in 1928, this work of lesbian historical fiction is about Maggie Dillon, a young trainee firefighter who fears her life is over after she kisses another woman at a party. She reads Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness and is forever changed.

Ronnie Madonna works as a farmhand in Lionheart after getting out of juvie but is still fighting to get her daughter Rainbow back. In order to do so, she has to confront her past, prove she can be a responsible parent, and keep fighting for the life she deserves. She’s also tied up with her boss Nev, a jaded former war photographer.

Literary criticism, lyric inquiry, and the poetics of friendship come together to create this queer poetry collection.

A sapphic regency romance about a duke and a courtesan that promises to queer and flip many of the tropes and conceits of the genre.

Two teenage internet enemies — Sam, who makes awareness-raising videos about crimes against LGBTQ+ teens, and Dylan — are thrown together for a true crime content creator event in a creepy Victorian mansion where one of the attendees ends up killed in the night.

A magical cozy fantasy with a sapphic romance, The Night King’s Court follows a daughter in search of her missing father.

In a rare bout of impulsivity, Clarity Jones has her first kiss with Hannah Fitzpatrick while at Christian summer camp. But when they’re found together, her life is thrown into chaos.

Nora thinks her luck has turned around when she wins the lottery to attend the mysterious and wealthy Lamour family’s exclusive magical Dream Gala, where she hopes to get accepted to their magical training program and secure some money to save her ailing brother.

Surely a topic that resonates with lots of queer and trans readers, this anthology about familial estrangement indeed features a slew of LGBTQ+ authors, including Deesha Philyaw, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore, noam keim, and more!

This novel imagines a fictional narrative for the real-life Hollywood star Katharine Hepburn. The bisexual, nonconformist Kate on the page struggles with the pressures of the industry and with personal grief against the backdrop of early 1930s Los Angeles.

This queer short fiction collection delves into the animal world, exploring the complicated relationship between nature’s creatures and humans, including a story about a lesbian love affair marked by a gift-giving crow.

Nicole Raziya Fong explores and refracts the language of identity formation in their poems that weave together visual and textual elements.

What other books should we have our eyes on for April? Let us know below! And if you’re looking for more gay reading material, you should also check out the latest issue of our print magazine, out now!