💊🐴September Bookclub🐴💊

Ponyboy

Eliot Duncan

£12.99 £12.34

A bildungsroman set over three acts, Ponyboy is a quest for self-identity set among the art world of Paris and Berlin. In the first act, Ponyboy's eponymous narrator-a pill-popping, speed-snorting trans-masculine lightning bolt-unravels in his Paris apartment. Ponyboy is caught in a messy love triangle with Baby, a lesbian painter who can't see herself being with someone trans, and Toni, a childhood friend who can actually see Ponyboy for who he is. Strung out, Ponyboy follows Baby to Berlin in act two, where he sinks deeper into drugs and falls for a fellow writer, all the while pursued by a megalomaniacal photographer hungry for the next hot thing. As Ponyboy's relationships crumble, he overdoses and finds himself alone in his childhood home in Iowa. The novel's final act follows Ponyboy to rehab, exploring the ways in which trans identity, addiction and recovery can reforge the bond between mother and child.

Mrs S

K Patrick

£16.99 £16.14

In an elite English boarding school where the girls kiss the marble statue of the famous dead author who used to walk the halls, a young Australian woman arrives to take up the antiquated role of ‘matron’. Within this landscape of immense privilege, in which the girls can sense the slightest weakness in those around them, she finds herself unsure of her role, her accent and her body. That is until she meets Mrs S, the headmaster’s wife, a woman who is her polar opposite: assured, sophisticated, a paragon of femininity. Over the course of a long, restless heatwave, the matron finds herself irresistibly drawn ever closer into Mrs S’s world and their unspoken desire blooms into an illicit affair of electric intensity. But, as the summer begins to fade, both women know that a choice must be made. K Patrick’s portrait of the butch experience is revelatory; exploring the contested terrain of our bodies, our desires and the constraints society places around both. Mrs S marks the arrival of a major new literary talent, unlike any other.

Lakiriboto

Ayodele Olofintuade

£11.99 £11.39

A twisty thriller about the fate of a sprawling family in Lagos, Lakiriboto is a queer, feminist revenge thriller like no other, in which murder, betrayal, and witchcraft collide - with explosive results. When her grandmother dies in the night, Moremi's fate falls to her uncle, the grasping family chief who sends her off to work as a housemaid in Lagos. On arriving there, Moremi finds that the big city is not all she thought it would be. But she's not alone. After another family death, Kudirat, accused of bringing misfortune to her close family, has also been sent to live as a maid in the same house, scrubbing floors and folding laundry for long-suffering Tola, whose abusive doctor husband refuses to treat. Together, with the help of her queer aunt Morieba, the four women must wrestle back control of their lives as the patriarchal traditions that govern the family push back against their freedoms. When Tola's condition worsens, someone new emerges, someone with revenge and redemption in mind. Mixing family saga, mobster pulp, and queer coming-of-age, Lakiriboto is a staggeringly original and surprising novel about Nigeria's queer and feminist communities, the struggles they face, and the lengths they will go to to overcome them.