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The Best Queer Books of 2024, According to NPR

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Danika Ellis

Associate Editor

Danika spends most of her time talking about queer women books at the Lesbrary. Blog: The Lesbrary Twitter: @DanikaEllis

Today, I have another installment of “The Best Queer Books of 2024, According to…” Previously, I sifted through The New York Times, Amazon, Publishers Weekly, and Barnes & Noble lists for the queer titles included. This time, I’m highlighting the NPR picks.

The year-end NPR list is a little different from most. They put out a list of hundreds of “Books We Love” from the year, which you can sort by category, like “Book Club Ideas” or “Seriously Great Writing” or “Historical Fiction” or “It’s All Geek to Me” or “Rather Short” or a combination of different aspects. There isn’t an LGBTQ filter, but that’s where I come in!

There are 351 books on the 2024 NPR list, so there’s a very good chance I missed some, but I spotted 31 queer titles included in a range of genres. It’s nice that they included queer books I haven’t seen mentioned in other lists, like Cuckoo by Gretchen Felker-Martin and A Thousand Times Before by Asha Thanki. Then again, they also included the new Abigail Shrier on this list—the author who wrote the incredibly transphobic and harmful book Irreversible Damage. So, that’s a real dent in how seriously I can take their recommendations.

Regardless of the source, these are some fantastic queer books of 2024 you might not have heard about elsewhere, so without further ado, here are the 31 best queer books of 2024, according to NPR.

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