I’ve been asked by the Bookshop.org team to compile a list of my favourite queer fiction. I tried and failed to pick 20, then 30, and have absolutely forced myself to settle on 40, but this was still tough. Included are novels I’ve read and loved recently, some I devoured as a young teen (Andrew Holloran, Edmund White and James Baldwin were beacons of all knowledge to me then, and still are), and others I’ve just never forgotten. ‘Dancer from the Dance’ and a few others should be here but I can’t find my copies – whoever has them, I will find you!

These are depressing times – Amazon monopolising just about everything, the very real threat of AI replacing every shred of creativity and emotional nuance that our actual human brains offer (except brains don’t need nuclear power stations to create things).

Independent bookshops, then, are more sacred than ever.

Baldwin famously said, ‘You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me the most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.’  Reading makes human beings connect with each other in ways few things can. That sanctity, permanence and quiet power of a novel, that private access to another person’s consciousness is something that has blown me away since I was old enough to be able to read. I’ll never outgrow that feeling.

Every sale through bookshop.org supports indies. We need them! I’d be lost without them (@stokeybookshop, @kirkdalebookshop, @gaysthewordbookshop, @thebbookshop, @burleyfisher, @wearebardbooks, @lrbbookshop are just a few of my favourites).

Virginia Woolf said books are mirrors of our souls, and she was right. Let’s keep it that way.

Forgive my hyperbole and geeky platitudes…but I know you agree!