15 of the Most-Anticipated Queer Books of 2025

This one looks so weird, and I’m so 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.”

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!

Fans of this magical girls-meets-sports story graphic novel series will be counting down the days until the third and final volume in the series! There’s romance, drama, and magic galore. In this volume—spoilers for the first two books—we get to see if this throuple has what it takes for a serious relationship or if it’s more true lust than true love.

Caro De Robertis is an award-winning writer best known for their literary fiction, including queer novels like Cantoras and The Gods of Tango. In this nonfiction collection, they draw on hundreds of hours of interviews to create an oral history of a generation of trans, nonbinary, genderqueer, and Two-Spirit elders of color. This looks like a powerful work that will add to the canon of trans history.

Caitlin Starling is the author of one of my favorite horror books, The Luminous Dead, so I am eagerly anticipating this one. The Starving Saints is a medieval horror story set a castle under siege whose food supply is running out when they’re saved by Constant Lady and her Saints, who offer “intoxicating feasts of terrible origin.” Those behind the walls begin to give in to the pleasures and excesses they offer, forgetting the enemy at their door. Three women at Aymar Castle see what’s really happening here and the danger the saints pose, but “they are not immune from the temptations of the castle’s new masters… or each other.” This looks like a wild ride, and I can’t wait to get into it!

Nicola Dinan’s debut novel Bellies received a lot of critical acclaim, including winning the Polari First Book Prize, and now she’s back with her sophomore novel, Disappoint Me. Max is a 30-year-old disillusioned trans poet who decides to reinvent her life after a fall down the stairs at a New Year’s Eve party. Vincent is a corporate lawyer who bakes in his free time; dating him seems to offer the perfect entry point into heteronormativity for Max. But he has baggage involving a whirlwind romance he had during his gap year in Thailand, and it threatens to upend Max’s attempt at “bourgeois domesticity.”

Look, sometimes a title is enough to become a most anticipated book, and this one nails it. These stories explore queer people turning to crime, whether “unintentionally, as a means of survival, as protest, as rescue, or to right injustices big and small.” There are hoax phone calls, assassination attempts, queer elders robbing a bank to save their bungalow, and more. The authors include Anna Dorn, Emily R. Austin, Francesca Ekwuyasi, Kayla Kumari Upadhyaya, Myriam Gurba, Myriam Lacroix, SJ Sindu, Venita Blackburn, and more.

This is maybe the most anticipated queer book of the year, given V. E. Schwab’s popularity. She is the bestselling author of The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, the Shades of Magic series, and many others. In her Instagram announcement for the book, she said, “The toxic lesbian vampires are coming,” and that’s enough to sell me on it. She also says this book is “a reckoning — both with myself and with my work” and that it’s a departure from trying to make herself and her stories “smaller, more palatable.” I can’t wait to see what that means. This follows three women in different time periods and locations — 1530s Santo Domingo de la Calzada, 1830s London, and 2019 Boston — whose immortal lives become intertwined.

Of course, we can’t leave off the newest from the author of Simon vs. the Homo Sapiens Agenda. Amelia has a bit of a parasocial relationship with bisexual YouTuber Walter Holland, and she knows they’d hit it off if they were ever to meet. So, when he hosts a meet and greet nearby, she convinces her friends to go on a road trip together to get there. Along the way, she realizes those butterflies in her stomach might actually be for her cynical, perpetually single best friend Natalie.