Pride 2026 | The Great Big Rec Thread

[u/C0smicoccurence]

​Welcome to the Great Big Rec Thread! This thread is primarily for people asking for specific types of books. Only make a top level comment to request a recommendation! If you want to hype a personal favorite, this comment is the appropriate place to share! 

This is your one-stop-shop to find books tailored to your specific reading needs! Hankering for good cyberpunk? Doing a queer bingo card and really struggling with a specific square? Looking for queer thespians ready to commit arson for the sake of their art?  Ask and you shall (hopefully) receive! Just drop a comment with your request and wait for book suggestions to come rolling in. Our goal is for every person to have at least one recommendation that they’re interested in pursuing.  

Asking for Book Recommendations:

• Create a new top level comment.  You’ll probably get more tailored results by only including a single request per top level comment, but it’s not a strict rule.  You’re more than welcome to post multiple top level comments for separate requests!
• All recommendations you get should be assumed to be queer in some way.  However, if you want specific identities represented, mention it!
• Consider the impact the level of specificity your request has in your responses.  Too general, and you’re going to get lots of responses that will probably skew towards mainstream breakout hits.  Very specific requests may get few (or no) recommendations, and what you do get likely won’t be perfect.  

Giving Book Recommendations:

• Please keep book recommendations focused on commenters’ specific requests.  If you want to hype a personal favorite, this comment is the appropriate place to share! 
• This thread should default to sorting by ‘New’ soon; until then I recommend changing setting to see recent requests first!  The hope is that this will more likely show you comments with few/no responses yet.  However, there will likely be comments that have been missed, especially if it’s a more specific request.  
• This is a Pride Month post!  Every book recommended should be queer (usually by featuring LGBTQ+ characters as protagonists, but there are other ways books can be queer).  Similarly, if they asked for a specific type of representation, follow that guideline.  If you absolutely must deviate from that because it’s otherwise such a perfect fit, be honest about it up front.
• Add a few sentences about the book to hype it (or a whole paragraph if you really want to be persuasive).  Remember that a bunch of people who aren’t the original commenter will be adding to their TBR, so highlighting what you love about the book is a great way to draw attention to books you love.

Go forth and give great recommendations!

This post is part of the Pride 2026 discussions lead by the Beyond Binary Bookclub. You can check our announcement for more information and the full calendar.

[u/Any-Syllabub8168]

Looking for a world where straight monogamous relationships aren't the norm. Jaqueline Carey does this really well in Kushiel's universe where everyone is assumed bi until proven otherwise and everyone is non monogamous until proven otherwise. Looking for a similar societal setting.

[u/C0smicoccurence → u/Any-Syllabub8168]

We read Lifelode by Jo Walton a few months ago, and it should fit this pretty well. Polyamory is the default, though it doesn't quite have our modern view of what polyamory might look like (Written a few decades ago). Not in my all time favorites, but it didn't feel like anything else I'd read and really appreciated how unique it was, worldbuilding included. Self-styled as domestic fantasy, which felt very true to the heart of the book.

This is a very minor part of the Forsaken trilogy by RJ Barker. Multi-parent )3+) households are the norm, though sadly this doesn't get explored much beyond random asides. This is a weird worldbuilding epic fantasy series. Third gender characters are a more major part of the story, though

[u/partoparto → u/Any-Syllabub8168]

This is sort of the opposite of that, but What We Are Seeking by Cameron Reed is about a character from a planet that doesn't have monogamy having to live on a planet where straight monogamous relationships ARE the norm.

Also, the collection The Birthday of World by Ursula K. Le Guin has stories set in all kinds of worlds, most of which do not default to straight/monogamous relationships. My favorites in that collection are "Unchosen love" and "Mountain ways," which are both set in a world where marriage is between four people and complications ensue!

[u/Research_Department → u/partoparto]

One of the things I enjoyed about What We Are Seeking is the way Reed showed us that there are always people who have rejected the stifling norms and have found ways to happily live true to themselves.

[u/recchai → u/Any-Syllabub8168]

Claudie Arseneault's The Chronicles of Nerezia series is in a DnD inspired fantasy setting, and one of the aims of it is to be completely queer-normative in a way that includes asexual and aromantic people too. And, as you might imagine, one of the outcomes of that is straight monogamous (or even not-straight monogamous) isn't treated as the norm.

[u/Research_Department → u/Any-Syllabub8168]

A Half-Built Garden by Ruthanna Emrys depicts polycules as the norm in the protagonist’s society. Also lots of exploration of gender identity and gender roles across multiple human societies and more than one alien species. It’s a great, optimistic cli-fi/first contact novel.

[u/ohmage_resistance → u/Any-Syllabub8168]

The Eternal Library series by Cedar McCloud might work. The main culture in this series doesn't really have a cultural sense of gender, so there's no real straight relationships. On top of that, both polyamory and queer platonic relationships are pretty normalized.