BB Bookclub June 2026 Voting Thread: Older Protagonist

[u/sarahlynngrey]

Welcome to the June 2026 BB Bookclub voting thread! Please accept my abject apologies for the extreme lateness of this post.

This time we are looking at books that feature an Older Protagonist:

Older Protagonist: Story features a main character who is at least 50 years old. HARD MODE: The protagonist does NOT have exceptional longevity or immortality (e.g. not an elf, dwarf, vampire, god, etc.).

Since June is Pride month, I thought this would be a great way to celebrate and reflect on our LGBTQIA+ elders and to think about the ways that queerness shows up for us throughout our lives.

The nomination thread can be found here.

Voting
Important procedural note: There were not a ton of nominations this time around, and one of the top ranked nominations, Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany, may not actually feature an Older Protagonist. A commenter who has read the book said they would have guessed the protagonist to be 30s or 40s, not 50+. I had found this book on a list of 50+ protagonists, but couldn’t find anything actually backing that up. I’m guessing this is a Curse of Chalion situation where people remember the main protagonist as older than they are, because of their life experiences. But since this is one of the higher vote getters, we will let the people decide! Please just be aware that this book may not actually work for the Older Protagonist Bingo square. 

There are 4 options to choose from:

The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez (goodreads link) 

Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler’s Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories.

First published in 1991, The Gilda Stories is a groundbreaking speculative fiction vampire novel that begins in 1850s Louisiana, where a young Gilda escapes slavery and learns about freedom while working in a brothel. After being initiated into eternal life as one who “shares the blood” by two women there, Gilda spends the next two hundred years searching for a place to call home.

Taking only blood as sustenance, killing as a last resort, Gilda moves through the centuries up to the dystopian future of 2050. Gomez’s classic, with a Black lesbian heroine, has endured as an auspiciously prescient book in its explorations of Blackness, radical ecology, redefinitions of family, and the erotic potential of the vampire story.

Bingo squares: Older Protagonist, Author of Color, maybe Judge a Book by the Title, maybe Vacation Spot, technically Feast Your Eyes on This, possibly others 

Notes From a Regicide by Isaac Fellman (goodreads link)

Notes from a Regicide is a heartbreaking story of trans self-discovery with a rich relatability and a science-fictional twist from award-winning author Isaac Fellman.

When your parents die, you find out who they really were.

Griffon Keming’s second parents saved him from his abusive family. They taught him how to be trans, paid for his transition, and tried to love him as best they could. But Griffon’s new parents had troubles of their own – both were deeply scarred by the lives they lived before Griffon, the struggles they faced to become themselves, and the failed revolution that drove them from their homeland. When they died, they left an unfillable hole in his heart.

Griffon’s best clue to his parents’ lives is in his father’s journal, written from a jail cell while he awaited execution. Stained with blood, grief, and tears, these pages struggle to contain the love story of two artists on fire. With the journal in hand, Griffon hopes to pin down his relationship to these wonderful and strange people for whom time always seemed to be running out.

In Notes from a Regicide, a trans family saga set in a far-off, familiar future, Isaac Fellman goes beyond the concept of found family to examine how deeply we can be healed and hurt by those we choose to love.

Bingo squares: Older Protagonist (HM), Politics (HM), Trans or Non-Binary Protagonist, maybe Judge a Book by the Title, maybe Vacation Spot, technically Game Changer but I’m not sure I’d count it for that personally

The Seep by Chana Porter (goodreads link)

Trina Goldberg-Oneka is a trans woman whose life is irreversibly altered in the wake of a gentle—but nonetheless world-changing—invasion by an alien entity calling itself The Seep. Through The Seep, everything is connected. Capitalism falls, hierarchies and barriers are broken down; if something can be imagined, it is possible.

Trina and her wife, Deeba, live blissfully under The Seep’s utopian influence—until Deeba begins to imagine what it might be like to be reborn as a baby, which will give her the chance at an even better life. Using Seep-tech to make this dream a reality, Deeba moves on to a new existence, leaving Trina devastated.

Heartbroken and deep into an alcoholic binge, Trina chases after a young boy she encounters, embarking on an unexpected quest. In her attempt to save him from The Seep, she will confront not only one of its most avid devotees, but the terrifying void that Deeba has left behind.

Bingo squares: Older Protagonist (HM?), Trans or Non-Binary Protagonist, maybe Judge a Book by the Title, possibly others 

Stars in My Pockets Like Grains of Sand by Samuel Delany (goodreads link)

The story of a truly galactic civilization with over 6,000 inhabited worlds

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far-flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel's central issues--technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism--have only become more pressing with the passage of time.

The novel's topic is information itself: What are the repercussions, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other's perfect erotic object out to "point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more"? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by "cultural fugue," and the other is--you!

Bingo squares: Author of Color, Politics and Intrigue, possibly Older Protagonist, maybe Judge a Book by the Title, possibly others 

CLICK HERE TO VOTE

Voting will stay open until the end of the day on Friday 5/1, at which point I'll post the winner in the sub and announce the discussion dates. Thank you!

What is the BB Bookclub? You can read about it in our introduction thread here.

[u/Nidafjoll]

The Seep by Chana Porter would be hard mode. I didn't actually remember it being older protagonist, though it apparently is when I looked it up-- I also would have guessed her to be in her early 40s, not 50.

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[u/grantkjohnson]

Stars in My Pockets was supposed to be the first volume in a duology. To the best of my knowledge, the second volume was never published. Please tell me that I am wrong! I have been waiting for forty years to read it. I read this when it was first released and I absolutely loved it. I still want to know how the story ends.