After Francesco


Brian Malloy - 2021
    Published on the 40th anniversary of the disease's first reported cases, this story is both a tribute to a generation lost to the pandemic as well as a powerful exploration of heartbreak, recovery, and how love can defy grief. Two years after his partner, Francesco, died, twenty-eight-year-old Kevin Doyle is dusting off his one good suit jacket for yet another funeral, yet another loss in their close-knit group. They had all been young, beautiful, and living the best days of their lives, though they didn’t know it. That was before New York City began to feel like a war zone, its horrors somehow invisible, and ignored by the rest of the world.Some people might insist that Francesco is in a better place now, but Kevin definitely isn’t. He spends his days in a mind-numbing job and his evenings drunk in Francesco’s old apartment, surrounded by memories. Francesco made everything look easy, and without him, Kevin struggles to keep going. And then one night, he stops trying. When Kevin awakens in a hospital, he knows it’s time to move back home to Minnesota and figure out how to start living again—without Francesco.With the help of a surviving partners support group and old and new friends, Kevin slowly starts to do just that. But an unthinkable family betrayal, and the news that his best friend is fighting for his life in New York, will force a reckoning and a defining choice. Drawing on his experience as part of the AIDS generation, Brian Malloy brings authenticity, insight, sensitivity, and humor to a story that is distinct yet universal in its powerful exploration of heartbreak and recovery, and the ways in which love can defy grief.

Gone, Gone, Gone


Hannah Moskowitz - 2012
    Sniper shootings throughout the D.C. area have everyone on edge and trying to make sense of these random acts of violence. Meanwhile, Craig and Lio are just trying to make sense of their lives. Craig’s crushing on quiet, distant Lio, and preoccupied with what it meant when Lio kissed him...and if he’ll do it again...and if kissing Lio will help him finally get over his ex-boyfriend, Cody.Lio feels most alive when he's with Craig. He forgets about his broken family, his dead brother, and the messed up world. But being with Craig means being vulnerable...and Lio will have to decide whether love is worth the risk.This intense, romantic novel from the author of Break and Invincible Summer is a poignant look at what it is to feel needed, connected, and alive.

The Pillar


Kim Fielding - 2014
    But a kind old man saved him, gave him a home, and taught him a profession. Now Faris is the herbalist for the town of Zidar, taking care of the injured and ill. He remains lonely, haunted by his past, and insecure about how his community views him. One night, despite his reluctance, he saves a dying slave from the pillar.A former soldier, Boro has spent the last decade as a brutalized slave. Herbs and ointment can heal his physical wounds, but both men carry scars that run deep. Bound by the constraints of law and social class in 15th century Bosnia, Faris and Boro must overcome powerful enemies to protect the fragile happiness they’ve found.

Eleventh Hour


Elin Gregory - 2016
    Miles relishes the opportunity to allow his alter ego, Millie, to spread her wings but if Miles wants the other agent’s respect he can never betray how much he enjoys being Millie nor how attractive he finds Allerdale.Pursuing a ruthless enemy who wants to throw Europe back into the horrors of the Great War, Briers and Miles are helped and hindered by nosy landladies, water board officials, suave gentlemen representing foreign powers and their own increasing attraction to each other.Will they catch their quarry? Will they find love? Could they hope for both?The clock is ticking.

Robby Riverton: Mail Order Bride


Eli Easton - 2018
    Robby Riverton is a rising star on the New York stage. But he witnesses a murder by a famous crime boss and is forced to go on the run--all the way to Santa Fe. When he still hasn't ditched his pursuers, he disguises himself as a mail order bride he meets on the wagon train. Caught between gangsters that want to kill him, and the crazy, uncouth family of his "intended", Robby's only ally is a lazy sheriff who sees exactly who Robby is -- and can't resist him.Trace Crabtree took the job as sheriff of Flat Bottom because there was never a thing going on. And then Robby Riverton showed up. Disguised as a woman. And betrothed to Trace’s brother. If that wasn’t complication enough, Trace had to find the man as appealing as blueberry pie. He urges Robby to stay undercover until the danger has passed. But a few weeks of having Robby-Rowena at the ranch, and the Crabtree family will never be the same again. Damn, what a kerfuffle. If only Trace can get rid of the fugitive while hanging on to his own stupid heart.

Come To The Oaks: The Story of Ben and Tobias


Bryan T. Clark - 2014
    Snatched abruptly from his homeland and enslaved into the Antebellum South, grand homes and majestic oak trees meant little to him. Now he is considered the property of other men, but his spirit would not be broken. The awkward Benjamin Nathanael Lee lives a privileged life. His father owns the largest tobacco plantation south of the Mason Dixon line. Ben wants little to do with the harsh realities of running a plantation—that is, until he meets Tobias, the one person that changes everything for him. Wealth, greed, and power brought them together. The same now threatens to separate them forever. The two men are on the verge of losing the one thing that matters: their love for one another. Against the odds, they steal off and embark on a journey to find freedom: the freedom to love one another and to live a life without the chains of slavery. Come to the Oaks is the tale of a forbidden romance—a love forged by two young men as they journey through a land that is tearing itself apart.

Collide


J.R. Lenk - 2012
    Or so it seems to invisible fifteen-year-old Hazard James. But when he falls in with bad apple Jesse Wesley, Hazard is suddenly shoved into the spotlight. Jesse and his friends introduce him to the underworld of teenage life: house parties, hangovers, the advantages of empty homes, and reputation by association. So what if his old friends don't get it? So what if some people love to hate him? Screw gossip and high school's secret rules. There's just something about walking into a room and having all eyes on him when just last year nobody noticed him at all.For a while Hazard basks in the attention, and before he realizes the depth of the waters he's wading, he and Jesse strike up a "friends with benefits" routine. It could be something more, but what self-respecting teenage boy would admit it? Not Jesse—and so not Hazard, either. Not until it's too late. Hazard and Jesse have collided, and Hazard's life will never be the same.

The Story of the Night


Colm Tóibín - 1996
    Richard Garay lives with his mother, hiding his sexuality from her and from society. Stifled by his job, Richard is willing to take chances, both sexually and professionally. But Argentina is changing, and as his country edges toward peace, Richard tentatively begins a love affair. The result is a powerful, brave, and poignant novel of sex, death, and the diffculties of connecting one's inner life with the outside world.

The World of Normal Boys


K.M. Soehnlein - 2000
    Soehnlein captures the spirit of a generation and an era, embodied in the haunting, unstoppable voice of thirteen-year-old Robin MacKenzie, a modern-day Holden Caulfield, whose struggle for a place in the world is as ferocious as it is real.The time is the late 1970s--an age of gas shortages, head shops, and Saturday Night Fever. The place, suburban New Jersey. At a time when the teenagers around him are coming of age, Robin MacKenzie is coming undone. While "normal boys" are into cars, sports, and bullying their classmates, Robin enjoys day trips to New York City with his elegant mother, spinning fantastic tales for her amusement in an intimate ritual he has come to love. He dutifully plays the role of the good son for his meat-and-potatoes father, even as his own mind is a jumble of sexual confusion and painful self-doubt. But everything changes in one, horrifying instant when a tragic accident wakes his family from their middle-American dream and plunges them into a spiral of slow destruction.As his family falls apart day by day, Robin finds himself pulling away from the unquestioned, unexamined life that has been carefully laid out for him. Small acts of rebellion lead to larger questions of what it means to stand on his own. Falling into a fevered triangle with two other outcasts, Todd Spicer and Scott Schatz, Robin embarks on an explosive odyssey of sexual self-discovery that will take him beyond the spring-green lawns of suburbia, beyond the fraying fabric barely holding together his quickly unraveling family, and into a complex future, beyond the world of normal boys.In The World Of Normal Boys, K.M. Soehnlein has created a dazzling gem of a debut novel in the tradition of Ordinary People and A Boy's Own Story, one that sparkles with raw honesty, poetic beauty, wry insight, and a rare richness of emotion that reverberates long after the last page is read. It is a story about growing up and falling apart, of rebellion and acceptance, of unspoken lives and irreversible choices that are made.

Hamilton's Battalion: A Trio of Romances


Rose Lerner - 2017
    Decades later, when Eliza Hamilton collected his soldiers' stories, she discovered that while the war was won at Yorktown, the battle for love took place on many fronts...PROMISED LAND by Rose LernerDonning men's clothing, Rachel left her life behind to fight the British as Corporal Ezra Jacobs--but life catches up with a vengeance when she arrests an old love as a Loyalist spy.At first she thinks Nathan Mendelson hasn't changed one bit: he's annoying, he talks too much, he sticks his handsome nose where it doesn't belong, and he's self-righteously indignant just because Rachel might have faked her own death a little. She'll be lucky if he doesn't spill her secret to the entire Continental Army.Then Nathan shares a secret of his own, one that changes everything...THE PURSUIT OF... by Courtney MilanWhat do a Black American soldier, invalided out at Yorktown, and a British officer who deserted his post have in common? Quite a bit, actually.* They attempted to kill each other the first time they met.* They're liable to try again at some point in the five-hundred mile journey that they're inexplicably sharing.* They are not falling in love with each other.* They are not falling in love with each other.* They are.... Oh, no.THAT COULD BE ENOUGH by Alyssa ColeMercy Alston knows the best thing to do with pesky feelings like "love" and "hope": avoid them at all cost. Serving as a maid to Eliza Hamilton, and an assistant in the woman's stubborn desire to preserve her late husband's legacy, has driven that point home for Mercy—as have her own previous heartbreaks.When Andromeda Stiel shows up at Hamilton Grange for an interview in her grandfather's stead, Mercy's resolution to live a quiet, pain-free life is tested by the beautiful, flirtatious, and entirely overwhelming dressmaker.Andromeda has staid Mercy reconsidering her worldview, but neither is prepared for love—or for what happens when it's not enough.

Junction X


Erastes - 2011
    The trouble is he's been lying to himself all of his life. And first love, when it does come, hits him and hits him hard. Who is the object of his passion? The teenaged son of the new neighbours. Edward's world is about to go to hell. "Both a haunting tale of sexual obsession and a stunning portrait of an ordinary man caught up in the throes of an illicit love and teetering on the brink of self-destruction, told with pinpoint psychological insight and mouth-watering prose, this is a splendid example of the storyteller's art, reminiscent of James Baldwin." - Victor J. Banis, author of The Man from C.A.M.P.

Brokeback Mountain


Annie Proulx - 1997
     Ennis del Mar and Jack Twist, two ranch hands, come together when they're working as sheepherder and camp tender one summer on a range above the tree line. At first, sharing an isolated tent, the attraction is casual, inevitable, but something deeper catches them that summer. Both men work hard, marry, and have kids because that's what cowboys do. But over the course of many years and frequent separations this relationship becomes the most important thing in their lives, and they do anything they can to preserve it. The New Yorker won the National Magazine Award for Fiction for its publication of "Brokeback Mountain," and the story was included in Prize Stories 1998: The O. Henry Awards. In gorgeous and haunting prose, Proulx limns the difficult, dangerous affair between two cowboys that survives everything but the world's violent intolerance.

The Devil's Fire


Sara Bell - 2008
    He'll do what he has to, but he knows he'll never find a love like the one he's lost. Alric has problems of his own, but is willing to go along with the wedding to help defend his kingdom from the forces ready to tear it apart.When Alric is gravely injured, Gareth discovers the secret of Alric's magic, and discovers that he has feelings for Alric that he's been trying to deny. They may be able to heal Alric's wounds, but can they defeat the enemy that lurks behind the scenes, waiting for them to make one false move?Note: ISBN appears to be the same as another book. It's listed on the website as ISBN: 978-1-60370-249-2, 1-60370-249-0

The Scottish Boy


Alex de Campi - 2020
    Edward III is at war with Scotland. Nineteen-year-old Sir Harry de Lyon yearns to prove himself, and jumps at the chance when a powerful English baron, William Montagu, invites him on a secret mission with a dozen elite knights. They ride north, to a crumbling Scottish keep, capturing the feral, half-starved boy within and putting the other inhabitants to the sword.But nobody knows why the flower of English knighthood snuck over the border to capture a savage, dirty teenage boy. Montagu gives the boy to Harry as his squire, with only two rules: don't let him escape, and convert him to the English cause.At first, it's hopeless. The Scottish boy is surly and violent, and eats anything that isn't nailed down. Then Harry begins to notice things: that, as well as Gaelic, the boy speaks flawless French, with an accent much different from Harry's Norman one. That he can read Latin too. And when Harry finally convinces the boy – Iain mac Maíl Coluim – to cut his filthy curtain of hair, the face revealed is the most beautiful thing Harry has ever seen.With Iain as his squire, Harry wins tournament after tournament and becomes a favourite of the King. But underneath the pageantry smoulder twin secrets: Harry and Iain's growing passion for each other, and Iain's mysterious heritage. As England hurtles towards war once again, these secrets will destroy everything Harry holds dear.

Liquid Glass


Zathyn Priest - 2010
    Originally home to Viscount Eldon Davenport, one of history's most controversial poets, the house was sold by Davenport's parents after he was found dead of a gunshot to the head, the pistol that killed him in his hand. Reclusive painter Cameron McKenzie is the latest owner of Lillyport, and he doesn't believe in ghosts, at least until he accidentally raises Eldon from the dead. Enter parapsychologist Malcolm and psychic Trudy, each with their own agendas. Malcolm wishes to sever the link between Cameron and Eldon, while Trudy is attempting to keep them together. Will she be able to unravel Lillyport's secrets or does the answer to Eldon's survival depend on Cameron, a painting, and a guilt-ridden 19th century stable boy?