12 Must-Read New Queer Books Out in April 2025

Berlin in the 1930s is a good place to be queer — until the Nazis rise to power. Now, queer and trans people are being rounded up. In one fell swoop, Bertie loses his job at Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld’s renowned Institute of Sexual Science and the Eldorado Club, where the once thriving queer community spent their nights. Bertie barely manages to escape with his life and his girlfriend, Sophie, fleeing to a farm where they pose as an elderly couple until the end of the war. But the Allied victory poses a new threat because while they’re liberating everyone else, queer prisoners are being arrested. So when a young trans man still wearing prison clothes from a concentration camp collapses in their yard, Bertie and Sofie know they’ll go to any length to protect him from the very people who claim to be rescuing the nation. —Rachel Brittain

A queer romance from Jasmine Guillory? What have we done to deserve this good fortune? The brilliant mind of Jasmine Guillory who brought us The Wedding Date, The Proposal, Party of Two, and Royal Holiday, is back with a new contemporary romance about a series of flirting lessons that soon turn into something more. Now if that doesn’t sound like the perfect premise for a romance novel, I don’t know what does. —Rachel Brittain

This is the adult debut of an amazing YA author! If you’ve read any of Jonny’s other work, you know they’re amazing with putting together words and making their plots Angsty But Fun. I expect nothing different from Futbolista. 

Gabi is a freshman soccer football player, with dreams of playing for La Liga or MLS. He’s also pretty sure he’s straight. But when a new friend offers to tutor him, the time they spend together leads Gabi to ask a few questions about himself. I’m sat, and I’m ready to cry. Bring it. —Jessica Pryde

The author of Mistakes Were Made, Something to Talk About, and Cleat Cute is back with a new queer romance, this time with a nonbinary love interest! Elsie has been engaged to her college boyfriend for a year when she learns he’s planned their wedding and honeymoon, and it’s happening in a week. Surprise! That’s the wake-up call she needed to realize she never wanted this marriage, and now she’s off to that non-refundable Caribbean honeymoon with her best friend, Ginny. Ginny has been in love with her for more than a decade, and they make Elsie a deal to encourage her to speak up for herself more: for this week, Elsie can have anything she asks for. Ginny just wasn’t expecting Elsie to ask for them. As you’d expect from that magnificent cover, this one is spicy!

This is a queer historical cozy fantasy about a Puerto Rican immigrant and a merman. In 1910s New York City, Benny is hired to build a new tank for a Coney Island amusement park. It’s the home of Rio, an actual merman stolen from the East River. As Benny spends time with Rio and getting to know his gentle soul and kind heart, he realizes he has met his soulmate. But his love with Rio will mean setting him free, which may cost Benny his job, his family, and the merman he loves. —Liberty Hardy

When the Tides Held the Moon

This is Nghi Vo’s fun companion novel to The Chosen and the Beautiful, a queer reimagining of The Great Gatsby from Jordan Baker’s point of view. This time, Nick Carraway is the Fitzgerald character leading the story. It’s twenty years after the events of The Great Gatsby, events that have haunted him. But now he may actually really be haunted by the past… —Liberty Hardy

From the author of Dead Collections comes a trans family saga with a sci-fi twist. Griffon escaped his abusive family with the help of his second parents, who supported him through his transition. Now that they’ve died, though, Griffon is discovering a different side to them. Through his father’s journal, written from a jail cell, Griffon learns more about the past that scarred his second parents, including the failed revolution that sent them fleeing from their homeland.

This is an exciting sci-fi novel that explores the dangers of AI (which has already become too real.) In Awakened, Wilder wakes up in Brooklyn one morning and discovers they understand every language in the world. This leads them to a small coven of trans witches, all with their own awakened abilities. When their world comes under threat from an evil artificial intelligence, they will have to use their powers to stop it. —Liberty Hardy

This one looks so weird, and I’m excited for it! Meet Baby, an orchid growing in the mall whose hunger can only be sated by one thing: Neve, the florist he adores. If he could only devour her, he’d be able to grow big and strong and be satisfied. Meanwhile, Shell has just left her fiancé and started working at the flower shop on a whim. She quickly begins to fall for Neve. It’s a cute workplace romance! What could go wrong? The description says it’s a “story about possession, and monstrosity, and working retail. It is about hunger and desire, and other terrible things that grow.”

This came out in Canada at the end of March, and now it’s also available in the U.S. I always find it difficult to summarize poetry collections, so I’ll let the publisher’s description do the talking: “a body more tolerable is a collection of powerful and haunting poems combining faerie tales, mythology, and a self-divinized female rage. Divided into three parts, the book examines Indigenous grief, trans identity, and frustrated desires in ways that reject perception. Gone is the soft, kind, gentle girl that author jaye simpson once thought she would become. Instead, she unravels the sticky threads of colonialism with poems that exact lyrical acts of self-surgery.”

Angels, vampires, and mortals are fighting for love in this debut Black sapphic vampire YA fantasy! There’s an angel who was betrayed by the goddess she loved and made a monster, who now waits for her chance to get revenge. And there’s the princess of a vampire nation who travels to the island of the dead to rescue her friend, a mission that threatens to destroy her the closer she gets. It all adds up to a monster of a good time. —Liberty Hardy

Derrick Chan is the golden boy of his middle school, a star on the basketball team. But there are parts of himself he keeps hidden, like the nail polish on his toenails, his private lip-syncing performances, and his crush on a teammate. When he stays with his grandmother over the summer, he has a chance to perform in a beauty pageant—but is he ready to take the stage as his whole self?

This is the debut of Kyle Casey Chu, aka Panda Dulce, a founding drag queen of Drag Story Hour!