The Gay Book Club Certified Reviews

Finished Heated Rivalry and want more? M/M romance has thousands of books, and the covers all look the same. Here are five gateway reads, from a big funny family to a magical Victorian mystery, plus a quick glossary for new readers.

A great book club pick gives people something to argue about. Here are six that will, from a Booker-shortlisted family drama to a 1950s newsroom romance, each with discussion questions your group can use tonight.

Search “bear romance” and you get shapeshifters. These five gay romances are about the other kind of bear: big, bearded men who get the guy.

Six cozy gay Christmas romances, from a hot mall Santa to a snowbound Montana Hallmark fantasy. M/M holiday reads picked by The Gay Book Club.

In 1988 Kingston, eight gay men start rehearsing a play, and a mob comes for them. Marlon James' "The Disappearers" follows the survivors. It's hard to read, beautifully written and an enormous undertaking that pays off.

Every gay bar has a fruit fly. Josh Silver’s debut gives us the ultimate one: a washed-up novelist who decides a young gay man’s life is hers to sell. “Fruit Fly” is shocking, laugh-out-loud funny and smarter than its premise needs to be.

John Macleod weaves a cloth certified as the real thing while passing as someone he isn't. In "John of John," Douglas Stuart moves from gay boys to the father who never got out. Growing up Mormon in Utah, I know how close I came to the same life.

A closeted senior, a bishop's son with a mission waiting, four months to write a book. Autoboyography gets Provo so right it stopped feeling like fiction — the Harris Fine Arts Center, the 3.2 beer, Families Are Forever framed on the wall. It's also about the closet nobody talks about: the one built by people who love you.

Henry Denton has 144 days to decide whether the world is worth saving, and after the year he's had, it's a genuine question. Shaun David Hutchinson wrote a book that's bleak, funny, and enormously kind — and the ending flipped my whole relationship to the title. I read it in a day and I'm still thinking about it.

Morgan Ashton-Drake came home to Yorkshire to shut down his family's crumbling hotel. He did not plan on the sunshine receptionist, the ready-made found family, or the ghosts who've decided his love life is their next big project. The Haunted Hotel is grumpy/sunshine comfort reading at its coziest—funny, sweet, and impossible to put down. Check in. You won't want to leave.

A bank clerk by day and a denizen of London's queer underworld by night, Selby Bigge talks his way into a millionaire's mansion and straight into a murder—one he has to solve without letting anyone discover what he is. A Queer Case is a whip-smart, fair-play whodunit with the wit of Coward, the bones of Christie, and a gloriously queer heart. It won the Lambda for a reason.

Two boys flee a doomsday cult with nothing but each other and a bus ticket out of Wyoming—and discover cheeseburgers, cable TV, and the radical idea that loving each other was never a sin. Goodbye Paradise braces you for despair and hands you something tenderer: a first-love story about unlearning shame and building the family that finally lets you breathe.

A closeted teen in 1994, a library book hiding a secret, and a romance written one margin note at a time. Boy Like Me is funny, furious, and quietly devastating—a coming-of-age that's also a love letter to the books that find us when no one else will. Set in the shadow of Britain's "Don't Say Gay," it has never felt more urgent.

A.J. Truman's Single Dads Club is four cozy small-town M/M romances built on a premise I can't get enough of, which is grown, tired, imperfect men getting to be the romantic leads. It's funny, it's warm, it's shameless about the horny bits, and the happy ending is never once in doubt. Formulaic by design and proud of it. As comfort reading goes, this set is the real deal.

Hiro sees dead people—and they will not stop heckling him. Pair that with a grumpy homicide detective who doesn't believe in ghosts and you get Medium Trouble: creative, fast, and gleefully unserious paranormal mysteries that know exactly how ridiculous they are. Realism is not the point. Fun is.

Rain Christiansen sees dead people, and it cost him his FBI career and the man he loved. Five books of solid cold-case mysteries, razor-sharp banter, and a second-chance romance that earns every beat. The Spectral Files is paranormal procedural done right.

An American accidental heir, two enemy politicians on the run, and a prince who can't charm his own bodyguard — Jax Calder's Unlikely Dilemmas series is high-concept, fast, and shameless about its own implausibility. It stretches credibility at every turn and I didn't care once. Comfort reads with a pulse, and a B+ from me.

Nicolas DiDomizio's A Murder Most Camp is a tight, funny Adirondack whodunit with a snarky nepo-baby sleuth worth rooting for. A solid summer read.

Some weekends call for one beautiful literary novel. Others call for a 9-book romance series and a cleared calendar. Here are 7 of the best M/M romance series to binge—Lucy Lennox's Forever Wilde, Gregory Ashe's Hazard and Somerset, Sarina Bowen's Vino and Veritas, and more. Bring snacks.

Small town M/M is one of the coziest corners of the genre—and one of the most beloved. From Lucy Lennox's sprawling Forever Wilde universe to May Archer's chaotic Vermont towns to Riley Hart's emotionally weighty Fever Falls, here are 10 of the best to disappear into. Pour something hot, find a soft chair, and settle in.