LGBTQ+ History Month

Recommendations31st January 2025

It's February and it's LGBTQ+ History Month! The event was founded in 2005 to celebrate the diverse history of LGBTQ+ people and, this year, the theme is activism and social change. From literary fiction to YA novels, personal memoirs to studies about the fight for social justice and post-war history, we've gathered some of our favourite queer titles. This is a tiny snapshot of such a rich landscape – it was difficult to pick just a few titles to share! You can find all of these books, and many more, currently on display in the bookshop.

A Bookshop of One’s Own cover

A Bookshop of One’s Own

It's all too easy to romanticise bookselling, but in this heartfelt and inspiring record of Silver Moon Women's Bookshop's existence Cholmeley lays bare the harsh realities of retail, particularly as a lesbian-owned business in Thatcher's Britain dealing with misogyny and homophobia daily. It's a personal yet all-encompassing history that drives home the importance of bookshops as safe community spaces, as information centres, and as meeting places of ideas.

Zoe

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Published: 13th Feb '25

Format: Paperback

Price: £10.99

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique cover

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique

Selena

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Published: 26th May '20

Format: Paperback

Price: £21.99

Last Night at the Telegraph Club cover

Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Amidst McCarthyism and the Red Scare, Lily is secretly collecting articles about male impersonators and lesbian bars. Then she meets Kath and soon, the two girls are sneaking to the Telegraph Club together and falling in love. But discovery threatens at every turn, putting at risk everyone they hold dear. An essential glimpse of what it was like to be queer and Chinese American in the 1950s in San Francisco's Chinatown.

Ness

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Published: 18th Mar '21

Format: Paperback

Price: £9.99

Neon Roses cover

Neon Roses

Neon Roses follows a young woman named Eluned in 1980s Wales whose life is changed by the arrival of the group Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners. Caught between the chance at a new, freer life in Cardiff and the responsibility she feels towards her family, Eluned must decide for herself what she wants her life to be.

Molly

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Published: 1st Feb '24

Format: Paperback

Price: £9.99

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One-Dimensional Queer

Marc

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Published: 19th Oct '18

Format: Paperback

Price: £14.99

The City We Became cover

The City We Became

New York City is on the brink of greatness – but ancient and malicious forces from beyond our reality seek to destroy it. Five people, each from a different borough, soon find their lives and personal struggles are all connected in a battle for the soul of the city itself. What follows is brilliantly unique, exciting, and inventive weird-science-fiction, which is both an homage and a rebuke to Lovecraft, all told masterfully and authentically by N.K. Jemisin. Abstract concepts become weapons: money, art, work, politics, big yellow taxis – all of them are to play for in this interdimensional battle. With a fantastic cast of characters, all of them fearless and honest and complicated, this book is about community, expression, understanding, and the dream of a city to call home.

Katya

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Published: 29th Jul '21

Format: Paperback

Price: £9.99

there are more things cover

there are more things

there are more things is a highly inventive and interconnected novels about the lives, histories, and relationships of two people living in London in 2016. Melissa is a South London native raised by her mother and a motly crew of grandmothers, and Caterina is from a political family in Brazil. They meet for the first time in 2016, and what follows is an expansive and lyrical expression of queerness, sisterhood, and political activism.

Jenna

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Published: 27th Apr '23

Format: Paperback

Price: £9.99

Miss Major Speaks cover

Miss Major Speaks

Documenting the life of Miss Major Griffin-Gracy from her time at the Stonewall Riots, Bellevue psychiatric hospital, Attica Prison, and as a former sex worker during the HIV/AIDS crisis, Miss Major Speaks highlights the work and struggles of POC trans elders and activists. The conversations question the constant riddle of collective liberation, the politics of representation, and the need for activism outside of mainstream institutions.

Faye

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Published: 16th May '23

Format: Paperback

Price: £9.99

Pity cover

Pity

McMillan explores themes of working class queerness, family life, drag and the traditions of northern English towns. I loved the intricacies of Pity's rhythm from start to finish.

Euan

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Published: 13th Feb '25

Format: Paperback

Price: £9.99

Cleanness cover

Cleanness

In Cleanness, a young American man teaching English in Bulgaria reflects on sexuality and intimacy in the midst of a culture that is not his own. Life as a queer person in Garth Greenwell's Sofia is fraught and secretive, and the nation seems poised on the precipice of a political and social transformation that may not include its queer citizens. Greenwell's prose is just so beautiful - precise, hot, and heartbreaking.

Amos

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Published: 21st Jan '12

Format: Paperback

Price: £9.99

Boulder cover

Boulder

In Boulder (translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches), Eva Baltasar paints the portrait of an alienated woman in a perpetual quest for freedom. At just under a hundred pages and part of a triptych exploring the lives of three queer women, Boulder is intense, beautiful and raw, and a powerful story of motherhood. I loved it.

Alice

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Published: 2nd Aug '22

Format: Paperback

Price: £11.99

The LGBTQ + History Book cover

The LGBTQ + History Book

The Team

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Published: 6th Apr '23

Format: Hardback

Price: £19.99

Guest Privileges cover

Guest Privileges

The Team

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Published: 28th Mar '24

Format: Hardback

Price: £18.99

Dear Senthuran cover

Dear Senthuran

Akwaeke Emezi is a literal god and not of this world. Each chapter of Dear Senthuran: A Black Spirit Memoir is set up like a letter to someone as they write about their existence and coming to understand their identity that isn't necessarily of this world. It is raw, painful, and beautiful as they unfold their stories and experiences as an entity that lives in flesh. Suspend Western terminology around queerness and the body as you approach this book because it is insufficient - the irony that I am a Western person using this language to recommend a book is not lost on me. But Dear Senthuran is an important and necessary memoir in understanding the numerous and endless ways of how queer people navigate the world.

Jenna

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Published: 21st Jul '22

Format: Paperback

Price: £12.99

Some Men In London: Queer Life, 1945-1959 cover

Some Men In London: Queer Life, 1945-1959

The Team

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Published: 30th May '24

Format: Hardback

Price: £30.00