AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

The Swimming-Pool Library

Alan Hollinghurst · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Tipping the Velvet

Sarah Waters · 480 pages

Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-h

Sexual OrientationLondonClassismLGBTQ+ Protagonist
❤️
ClassismLyrical ProseSexual OrientationLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Untouchable

John Banville · 410 pages

(From the Hardcover edition) Twenty years after his "retirement," ex-spy Victor Maskell attempts to come to terms with what has happened to his life by embarking on his memoirs. This is the plot which fuels Banville's stunning new novel--a story that goes beyond the mere facts of espionage to penetrate the intricate heart of the spy.

Sexual OrientationLyrical ProseLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLondon
❤️

The Beautiful Room Is Empty

Edmund White · 199 pages

When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with guilty but insatiable stirrings toward other men. Moving from a Midwestern college to the Stonewall Tavern on the night of the first gay uprising--and p

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
❤️

Call Me by Your Name

Andre Aciman · 256 pages

It's the summer of 1983, and precocious 17-year-old Elio Perlman is spending the days with his family at their 17th-century villa in Lombardy, Italy. He soon meets Oliver, a handsome doctoral student who's working as an intern for Elio's father. Amid the sun-drenched splendor of their surroundings, Elio and Oliver discover the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that will

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
❤️

What Belongs to You

Garth Greenwell · 208 pages

"A haunting novel of erotic obsession by a major new talent On an unseasonably warm autumn day, an American teacher walks down a stairwell beneath Sofia's National Palace of Culture, looking for sex. Among the stalls of a public bathroom he encounters Mitko, a charismatic young hustler. He returns to Mitko again and again over the next few months, and their trysts grow increasingly intimate and un

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
❤️

The End of Eddy

Edouard Louis · 200 pages

"An autobiographical novel about growing up gay in a working-class town in Picardy. "Every morning in the bathroom I would repeat the same phrase to myself over and over again. Today I'm really gonna be a tough guy." Growing up in a poor village in northern France, all Eddy Bellegueule wanted was to be a man in the eyes of his family and neighbors. But from childhood, he was different -- "girlish,

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistClassismLiterary Fiction
❤️

Sodom and Gomorrah

Marcel Proust · 384 pages

"John Sturrock's new translation of Sodom and Gomorrah will introduce a new generation of American readers to the literary riches of Marcel Proust. the fourth volume in this edition of In Search of Lost Time - the first completely new translation of Proust's masterpiece since the 1920s - brings us a more comic and lucid prose than English readers have previously been able to enjoy." "Sodom and Gom

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
❤️

The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon

Tom Spanbauer · 361 pages

The Man Who Fell in Love with the Moon provides a unique view of the Old West unlike anything told before. The narrator, Shed, is one of the most memorable characters in contemporary fiction: a half-Indian bisexual boy who lives and works at the Indian Head Hotel in the tiny town of Excellent, Idaho. It's the turn of the century, and the hotel carries on a prosperous business as the town's brothel

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
❤️

A Life Apart

Neel Mukherjee · 352 pages

Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two and recently orphaned, finds the chance to start a new life when he arrives in England from Calcutta. But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritwik is looking for. Instead, he moves to London, where he drops out of official existence into a shadowy hinterland of illegal immigrants. The story that Ritwik writes to stave off his loneliness begins to find ghostly echoes in

Sexual OrientationClassismLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
❤️

Almost Life

Kiran Millwood Hargrave · 384 pages

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
🙂

Our Lady of the Flowers

Jean Genet · 318 pages

"Novel by Jean Genet, written while he was in prison for burglary and published in 1944 in French as Notre-Dame des fleurs. The novel and the author were championed by many contemporary writers, including Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Cocteau, who helped engineer a pardon for Genet. A wildly imaginative fantasy of the Parisian underworld, the novel tells the story of Divine, a male prostitute who cons

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
🙂

Days Without End

Sebastian Barry · 301 pages

Winner of the 2016 Costa Book of the Year and longlisted for the 2017 Man Booker Prize. Sebastian Barry's sensational new novel set in mid-19th Century America. After signing up for the US army in the 1850s, aged barely seventeen, Thomas McNulty and his brother-in-arms, John Cole, fight in the Indian Wars and the Civil War.Having both fled terrible hardships, their days are now vivid and fil

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLyrical ProseLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Hours

Michael Cunningham

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLondonLyrical Prose
🙂

The Child's Child

Barbara Vine · 311 pages

When their grandmother dies, Grace and Andrew Easton inherit her sprawling, book-filled London home, Dinmont House. Rather than sell it, the adult siblings move in together, splitting the numerous bedrooms and studies. The arrangement is unusual, but ideal for the affectionate pair--until the day Andrew brings home a new boyfriend. A devilishly handsome novelist, James Derain resembles Cary Grant,

Sexual OrientationClassismLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLondon
🙂

The Bricks that Built the Houses

Kate Tempest · 416 pages

"Becky, Harry, and Leon are leaving London in a fourth-hand Ford with a suitcase full of stolen money, in a mess of tangled loyalties and impulses. But can they truly leave the city that's in their bones?....Rich in character and restless in perspective, driven by ethics and empathy, it asks-and seeks to answer-how best to live with and love one another." -- page [2] book jacket.

LondonSexual OrientationLyrical ProseLGBTQ+ Protagonist
🙂

City of Night

John Rechy · 380 pages

When John Rechy's explosive first novel appeared in 1963, it marked a radical departure in fiction, and gave voice to a subculture that had never before been revealed with such acuity. It earned comparisons to Genet and Kerouac, even as Rechy was personally attacked by scandalized reviewers. Nevertheless, the book became an international bestseller, and fifty years later, it has become a classic.

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin · 224 pages

Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

The Immoralist

Andre Gide · 205 pages

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionLyrical Prose
🙂

Maurice

E.M. Forster · 256 pages

Maurice is a novel by E. M. Forster. A tale of homosexual love in early 20th-century England, it follows Maurice Hall from his schooldays through university and beyond. It was written in 1913–1914, and revised in 1932 and 1959–1960.

Sexual OrientationClassismLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
🙂

We the Animals

Justin Torres · 144 pages

"An exquisite, blistering debut novel. Three brothers tear their way through childhood-- smashing tomatoes all over each other, building kites from trash, hiding out when their parents do battle, tiptoeing around the house as their mother sleeps off her graveyard shift. Paps and Ma are from Brooklyn--he's Puerto Rican, she's white--and their love is a serious, dangerous thing that makes and unmake

Sexual OrientationLyrical ProseLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
🙂

The Last of the Wine

Mary Renault · 386 pages

The Last of the Wine is Mary Renault's first novel set in ancient Greece, the setting that would become her most important arena. The novel was published in 1956 and is the second of her works to feature male homosexuality as a major theme. It was a bestseller within the gay community.

Sexual OrientationLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLyrical ProseFirst Person Narrator
🙂

The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller · 368 pages

This is the story of the seige of Troy from the perspective of Achilles best-friend Patroclus. Although Patroclus is outcast from his home for disappointing his father he manages to be the only mortal who can keep up with the half-God Archilles. Even though many will know the facts behind the story the telling is fresh and engaging.

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistLyrical ProseSexual OrientationFirst Person Narrator
🙂

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Oscar Wilde · 224 pages

**The Picture of Dorian Gray** is a philosophical novel by Irish writer Oscar Wilde. A shorter novella-length version was published in the July 1890 issue of the American periodical *Lippincott’s Monthly Magazine*. The novel-length version was published in April 1891. (Source: [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Picture_of_Dorian_Gray))

LondonClassismLyrical ProseSexual Orientation

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.