Gender and sexuality play a leading role in these remarkable novels

Gender and baduality play a leading role in these remarkable new novels

GAYBCs: A queer alphabet, Rae Congdon

Montreal graphic designer Rae Congdon has updated the traditional ABC book for children to explain the essential terms of LGBT. Thus, C is not for chick, it is for cisgender ("describes a person who identifies with his bad badigned at birth"); It is not for the hat, it is for the heteronormative ("the worldview that advocates the right to be like the norm, you see: all the fairy tales"), etc. Fun, subversive and educational.

Do not take anything with you, Patrick Gale

Eustace is a middle-aged, HIV-positive Londoner undergoing treatment for thyroid cancer and recently in love with a young soldier deployed in Afghanistan. They have courted Skype and Eustace is looking forward to their first meeting in real life. It's half of the story. The other half is where Eustace became the interesting and fun man he is today, from the age of 11, when he fell in love with the cello. A story of transition to adulthood and a history of reconciliation. If you like this one, check out the latest novel by this British writer, A place called winter. You will never read a historical novel taking place in northern Canada in the same way.

Sketchtasy, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

It's a real slice of life: it takes place in 1996 in Boston, where Alexa and her gay friends feed on coca, k, pot and ecstasy. Alexa works in a call center at a mall trying to entice people to sign up for the Visa Uncommon Clout card, where every purchase helps the gay community. This heartbreaking and raggedy novel is the fifth book of the Seattle writer.

Sarah Day, Mussolini Island

In the late 1930s, 45 homobadual men from Catania prefecture, Sicily, were interned about 600 km away on San Domino, an Adriatic island off the Italian coast. They were among hundreds of people gathered during this period, although Mussolini officially denied the existence of the "scourge of pederasty" among the Italians. This opens the way to Sarah Day's first novel about a young Sicilian named Francesco, one of those taken from family and homeland and detained with his friends and enemies.

The tiger flu, Larissa Lai