Ten Books About Mothers and Their Queer Sons, Recommended by Mario Elías

Ten Books About Mothers and Their Queer Sons, Recommended by Mario Elías


My mom gets every saying wrong. Not occasionally. Consistently, creatively, and with complete confidence. “Don’t be a stick in a butt! It’ll be fun!” Some of my most joyful memories are sitting around the kitchen table with my sisters and cousins, laughing until we cried at whatever she’d mangled that day. “Pickers can’t be choosers, Mayito!” That is exactly what they are, Ma.
She also taught me to dance salsa so I could impress my abuela and my tías. She was my champion when a guidance counselor denied me entrance to accelerated classes I had qualified for simply because I was bilingual. She accepted everything about me without question. Her response to me coming out was simply “Don’t you think I know that already?” as she steered the car around a corner, ‘Hey Ya’ by Outkast playing in the background.

My mother wasn’t always laughing, and I often felt it was my responsibility as a kid to pick her up when she was down. I was there cheering when she decided to make changes for herself. I was there when she walked across a stage to receive her first college degree while raising three kids. And my grandparents, who had been through more than I understood at the time, beamed like it was the best day of their lives. It probably was. Most kids don’t get to witness their parents achieve milestones like that, but I did. I feel lucky to have been celebrated by my mother and also get to celebrate her successes as well. To lift her up when she’s down and to lift her even higher when she is up.
I say all this because the ten books I compiled for this list are, at their core, about that specific current of love that runs between mothers and sons: complicated, sometimes devastating, and when you’re lucky, mutual in ways that surprise and eventually define you. 

For Queer sons and their mothers, that current carries extra voltage. There’s more to navigate, more that can go unsaid, more that has to be invented from scratch because there’s no existing script to follow. These ten stories are heartbreaking yet hopeful, often strange and surreal, but they all capture a different facet of the unique bond between mothers and their Queer sons.

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Sara Van Os on Death, OCD, and Lesbian Longing in Decomposition Book

Sara Van Os on Death, OCD, and Lesbian Longing in Decomposition Book

Decomposition Book, Sara Van Os’s debut novel, is a deeply strange and surprisingly tender book about loneliness, connection, and the lengths we’ll go to hold onto someone who makes us feel less alone. It’s funny in the way only truly sad things can be — Savannah’s inner monologue is relentless and real, and her OCD intrusive thoughts are rendered with a specificity that will feel uncomfortably familiar to many readers. The dual structure — Savannah’s present-tense unraveling alongside Ava’s past-tense journal — builds toward a question the novel asks without quite answering: what does it mean to finally find your person, if that person is already gone?

After a catastrophic falling-out with her best friend, Savannah retreats to her parents’ empty lake house in upstate New York, where she spends her days in a fog of wine and obsessive, spiraling thoughts. She has no plan, no real purpose — just the particular kind of aimless grief that comes from losing someone you loved and knowing, at least partly, that it was your fault.

Then one morning she wakes up in the woods behind the house, next to a dead body.

Any reasonable person would call the police. Savannah reads the journal.

It belongs to Ava — a hiker who got lost in the wilderness and spent her final months fighting to survive, documenting every desperate, darkly funny, heartbreaking day. As Savannah moves through Ava’s pages, something unexpected happens: she starts to fall for her. Not just as a story, but as a person — sharp, irreverent, fully alive on the page in a way that makes the cold fact of her death feel unbearable.

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Read an Excerpt from All Them Dogs by Djamel White

Read an Excerpt from All Them Dogs by Djamel White

The following is an excerpt from All Them Dogs by Djamel White. He is an Irish writer and editor living in Dublin. He earned an MFA in creative writing from University College Dublin and was fiction editor for the inaugural issue of the literary and art journal Profiles.

All Them Dogs follows Tony Ward, who returns to Dublin after five years in exile in England, hoping to rebuild his place in the city’s criminal underworld after murdering a rival gang member. When he begins working for Flute Walsh, the enforcer of a local crime boss and a boy from his past, Tony finds himself drawn to him in ways he never expected. It is now available from Riverhead.

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Salomé author Leslie Baird loves the Goosebumps that scared her as a child

Salomé author Leslie Baird loves the Goosebumps that scared her as a child

In Leslie Baird‘s debut thriller Salomé, an American journalist named Courtney follows a magnetic French woman to a remote town in France, where fascination quickly curdles into paranoia. As Courtney becomes entangled with Salomé’s unsettling family, a mysterious wellness empire, and whispers of a cult obsessed with immortality, she must decide whether she’s uncovering the story that could define her career or walking willingly into something deadly.

Baird currently lives in Europe and received an MFA in fiction from Sewanee, the University of the South.

We asked her to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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Nerve Damage author Annakeara Stinson’s bed is surrounded by books 

Nerve Damage author Annakeara Stinson’s bed is surrounded by books 

Annakeara Stinson‘s writing has appeared in BustleBrooklyn MagazineThe Inquisitive EaterIndieWirePaste, and Marie Claire. Her debut novel, Nerve Damage, has been called “witty, sexy and moving” by PEOPLE. In it, Clarice flees New York for Los Angeles after a terrifying breakup spirals into stalking, harassment, and obsession. But when she believes her ex has resurfaced three years later, her search for the truth sends her into an increasingly unstable psychological spiral where paranoia, trauma, and reality begin to collapse into one another.

We asked Stinson to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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Ten Debut Multiple POV Novels Recommended by Rachel León

Ten Debut Multiple POV Novels Recommended by Rachel León

I love the depth multiple POV novels offer. Multiple perspectives allow us to see characters from different angles, complicating our idea of who they really are. While I appreciate a voicey first-person narrator, and know they’re a popular trend (I don’t have stats to back this up, but I’m sure a high percentage of contemporary novels are written in first-person), multiple POVs can widen the scope of the narrative, allowing the reader to know information one character has that another doesn’t, which adds delicious story tension. And multiple perspectives can bring extra richness, texture, and nuance to stories.

I’ll make another claim I can’t back up with hard data: multiple POV novels can be more difficult to query and sell. That was the case for my debut, How We See the Gray, which includes nine (yes, nine) perspectives. So for the querying writers out there—or just anyone hungry for beautiful, nuanced stories—I put together a list of some of my favorite multiple POV novels from the past few years… and they all happen to be debuts! 

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Six Metafictional Novels Recommended by Thomas Elrod

Six Metafictional Novels Recommended by Thomas Elrod

People are always looking for stories to sweep them away, to help them escape. There’s not inherently anything wrong with that, though sometimes I worry about taking that impulse to an extreme. When does immersion in a story start being harmful, both to the creators but also to the readers, viewers, and fans as well?

My new novel, The Franchise, imagines a fantasy film series that has taken the escapism mantra seriously. Unfortunately, since it’s owned by a growth-obsessed corporation, that means expanding the series beyond the bounds of mere films and into something like The Truman Show: a living set of the films’ world populated with characters acting out stories and scenarios in the world of the franchise (and being filmed). Fans can pay to have their memories altered and then live in this world – truly escape into it. Of course, there’s a cost to that.

I think the impulse to create stories that envelop us entirely is worth a little push back, which is why I always appreciate books that bounce up against the limits of their fictional constructs. These are books that are aware that the story, and the text itself, is not real, but that doesn’t mean that they think the story or the words don’t matter. Indeed, it’s often the case that the more metafictional a book is, the more urgent and serious it takes its mission to tell its story.

Here are some novels that engage with this metafictional impulse in various and often surprising ways.

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Lake Effect author Hillary Behrman has too many book recs to count

Lake Effect author Hillary Behrman has too many book recs to count

Hillary Berhman‘s debut short story collection, Lake Effect, was selected by Lauren Groff as the winner of the 2024 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction. In it, characters move through wild landscapes and emotionally fraught relationships as they struggle with isolation, longing, and the complicated ways people try to care for one another. Spanning settings from Seattle to Istanbul, these stories explore intimacy, family, labor, and dislocation in lives shaped as much by emotional distance as by fierce human connection.

We asked Berhman to answer our recurring My Reading Life Q&A so readers could get to know the books that shaped her life and influenced her writing.

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Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay on Cross-Cultural Tensions in Chitra Demands to Go Home

Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay on Cross-Cultural Tensions in Chitra Demands to Go Home

Chitra’s mind is in Kolkata, India, where she has a house she lovingly built with her late husband. But her physical body is stuck in a power wheelchair — in an assisted living facility in Columbus, Ohio. Because of this, Chitra is in a terrible mood most days. Rajendrani Mukhopadhyay’s debut novel, Chitra Demands to Go Home (out now from Modern Artist Press), follows the 75-year-old Bengali widow as she navigates her new existence after suffering a stroke. 

Chitra, it seems, will stop at nothing to leave this place she refuses to call home. 

This is a story with many themes: cross-cultural tensions, a mother’s immovable expectations for her adult children, friendship, and late-in-life identity. Readers can also expect plenty of humor thanks to the novel’s cantankerous main character. Mukhopadhyay herself was trained as a scientist and has spent much of her career in science communications. But for her book, she was largely inspired by her personal observations as a third culture kid who has lived in India, Kuwait, and Canada. We spoke with Mukhopadhyay about the demanding and difficult Chitra, humor’s role in this bittersweet, and much more.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarification.

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See the cover for What Kind of Mother by Judy Sandler

See the cover for What Kind of Mother by Judy Sandler

What Kind of Mother, the debut memoir by Judy Sandler, follows a mother confronting her son’s descent into severe mental illness as what first appears to be substance use disorder evolves into a dual diagnosis of bipolar disorder. As he rejects medication and cycles through alternative treatment programs that ultimately fail him, Sandler reckons with denial, guilt, and the painful realization that she cannot save her son—only he can save himself.

What Kind of Mother will be published on September 8, 2026, by West Virginia University Press.

Sandler’s work has appeared in The New York Times’ Tiny Love Stories, Yale University Journal of Medicine’s The Perch, The Atticus Review, Pangyrus, Grown and Flown, The University of Chicago’s The Awakenings Review, among other publications.

Debutiful is honored to reveal the cover of What Kind of Mother, which was designed by Kelley Galbreath, along with a Q&A with Sandler about its creation.

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