In the UK, June is normally a month full of celebrations for the LGBTQ+ community and their allies. With Pride marches and events cancelled or postponed nationwide in 2020, finding inclusive novels may feel more important than ever. Last year at The Motherload® Book Club we celebrated with a round up of our favourite gay, lesbian and inclusive novels of the past few decades. This year we spoke with publishers to see what’s new and exciting in the world of both fiction and non-fiction. We are delighted to share these new and upcoming releases that feature a diverse cast of characters or themes. Happy Pride one and all!
Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud
Irrepressible Betty Ramdin, her shy son Solo and their marvellous lodger, Mr Chetan, form an unconventional household, happy in their differences, as they build a home together. Home: the place where your navel string is buried, keeping these three safe from an increasingly dangerous world. Happy and loving they are, until the night when a glass of rum, a heart to heart and a terrible truth explodes the family unit, driving them apart.
In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.
Wonderland by Juno Dawson
Alice lives in a world of stifling privilege and luxury – but none of it means anything when your own head plays tricks on your reality. When her troubled friend Bunny goes missing, Alice becomes obsessed with finding her. On the trail of her last movements, Alice discovers a mysterious invitation to ‘Wonderland’: the party to end all parties – three days of hedonistic excess to which only the elite are welcome.
Gears for Queers by Abigail Melton and Lilith Cooper
Keen to see some of Europe, queer couple Lilith and Abigail get on their old bikes and start pedalling. Along flat fens and up Swiss Alps, they will meet new friends and exorcise old demons as they push their bodies and their relationship to the limit.
Easier Ways to Say I Love You by Lucy Fry
Buy Easier Ways to Say I Love You
Lucy Fry’s story opens with the heady and impassioned affair she embarked on during her wife’s pregnancy. It is a relationship that appears to be unstoppable, perhaps even addictive, despite guilt and self-questioning.
With intense and unflinching honesty, she takes her readers on a compelling journey from childhood trauma to addiction then sobriety, infidelity to polyamory and, perhaps most intensely of all, from her fear around being a parent to her exquisite joy at having a son.
Buy Easier Ways to Say I Love You
Death of a Mermaid by Lesley Thomson
Freddy Power walked out of her childhood home twenty-two years ago, and swore never to return. But now she’s back, helping run her family’s fishery in Newhaven in the wake of her mother’s death.
It feels as if time has stood still. The only thing that’s really changed is her childhood friendship with Toni and Mags. Freddy is not planning to be in Newhaven for long. But when Mags goes missing, old secrets – and old passions – are reignited. Freddy is determined to stay and find her friend. Even if it means confronting the past, and facing up to the truth about her family.
In at the Deep End by Kate Davies
Julia has had enough. Enough of the sex noises her roommate makes. Enough of her dead-end government job. Enough of the one-night stand who accused her of breaking his penis. The only thing she hasn’t had enough of is orgasms; she hasn’t had proper sex in three years.
So when Julia gets invited to a warehouse party in a part of town where trendy people who have lots of sex go on a Friday night, she readily accepts. And that night she meets someone: a figurative artist who also happens to be a woman.
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