**A Place Called Winter - Patrick Gayle (Headline) **
Gorgeous, epic, heartbreaking and also full of a lot of farming. Seriously, you could start a smallholding of your own once you’ve read this. Harry Cane, the privileged elder son of one of the British Empire’s finer families, is banished to start a homestead in Canadian prairies on the discovery that he is - despite being married - gay. A clean slate .. if he can master the Canadian wilds. This was not an uncommon fate for men ‘of his kind’, and his journey to Canada and experiences there make both harrowing and exhilarating reading. This isn’t prissy historical fiction thought - Gayle’s characters are powerfully alive. Harry has a proper, erotic heart-stopper of a romance, and there are wonderful female and trans characters crossing his path as well. It might be set 100 years ago, but it’s a very modern book.
Brighton Trans*Formed - Stella Cardus (Queenspark Books)
This is no mainstream page-turner, but it doesn’t make it any less powerful. Put together by a collective working with Queenspark Books in Brighton, it tells the experience of many of the city’s trans community in their own words - from childhood, to transition and beyond. A lot of the texts reads as unedited transcriptions - but given that the stories of the trans community are so often either erased or edited into quick, lazy, headline-friendly narratives, this is no bad thing. If the idea of ‘saying the wrong thing’ to someone trans makes you anxious (or you’ve got a parent whose language could do with a bit of a tweak) then this is a great place to start. Diversity never seemed so, well, normal.
Becoming Westerley - Jamie Brisick (Outpost 19 Books)
Peter Drouyn was one of Australia’s great surfing legends in the 1960s and 1970s. A pioneer of ‘power surfing’ he was as broad shouldered as he was charismatic. These days, Peter Drouyn is only ever referred to in the third person by Westerly Windina, the elegant, glamorous sixty-something bombshell who has taken his place. Brisick’s biography of Westerly is astonishing, particularly as it deals with so much - a short history of surfing, a look at two apparently quite distinct, bombastic characters and a transition that only took place a couple of years ago. Much more than a book about either surfing or transgender politics, it’s brilliant as an examination of celebrity and identity as well.
Eating Cake - Stella Duffy (Hodder)
These days Stella Duffy is perhaps better known as the founder of Fun Palaces. But back in 1999 Eating Cake was the novel that first got her really noticed. With just about the most 90s bookcover of all time (featuring Duffy) it tells the story of a woman who finds having a lovely husband and home suffocatingly so dull that she embarks on an affair, then a second affair with a woman. Of course, there are consequences .. but it still makes a fantastically filthy and liberating read for anyone who’s bored of all their mates getting happily married. An excess of options never seemed like so much fun.
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit - Jeanette Winterson (Vintage books)
A game-changer not just for lesbian fiction but for all coming of age stories. Winterson’s novel, first published in the 1980s, is heavily autobiographical: a young girl growing up in a strict Pentecostal community, struggling with her hormones, her mother and her teen angst as much as her sexuality. It is bleak at points and surprisingly funny at others, but Winterson’s prose is exquisite throughout. Over the last 30 years it’s gone from being a book that teenage girls would pass slyly to each other with a giggle to one that is on the UK curriculum. Good writing works wonders.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.