Fall books roundup 2025, part 1 – Fab fantasy, Kenyan coming of age, Ukrainian quests and more

For LGBTQ readers of every hue in the rainbow, there is a mountain of recently published books ready to be enjoyed, including by best-selling local authors Charlie Jane Anders and Rabih Alameddine. Here are just a few new and very notable fiction offerings, followed by more through September, featuring some of the best nonfiction and creatively queer books publishers and authors have to offer.

“Lessons in Magic and Disaster” by Charlie Jane Anders; $29.99 (Tor)
In this fantastic new contemporary fantasy from award-winning author Charlie Jane Anders, a daughter raised by two mothers reveals a critical, life-changing, supernatural secret. Trans grad student Jamie Sandthorne has been a stealth closet-witch for years, and now that all her practice time conjuring spells and small life-improvement rituals is finished and her mother Mae has sadly passed on, it’s time to tell her other mother Serena the whole truth.

This truth isn’t so easily processed for Serena, however, who is heavily encased in grief over her wife’s death, and she vengefully warps her daughter’s gift into something to weaponize instead of something to cherish and harmlessly cultivate.

What ensues is a beautifully written queer feminist story of family magic, grief, identity, the fight against intolerance, the enduring fight for queer social justice and equality, and, yes, witchcraft, but in Anders’ capable hands, it’s a magically immersive achievement. Don’t miss it.  
https://torpublishinggroup.com/

Charlie Jane Anders will read from and discuss her latest novel at the Writers with Drinks event Sept. 19, 7pm at Strut, 470 Castro St. https://www.sfaf.org

“Lonely Crowds” by Stephanie Wambugu, $28 (Little, Brown)
Kenyan-born writer Stephanie Wambugu’s elegant, poignant debut coming-of-age novel is a striking feat of language and emotion. It follows Ruth, a successful artist, who presently is finding things in general difficult to navigate now that her closest friend Maria has vanished from her daily life.

Gorgeous sections backtracking in time comprise the remainder of the book and portray Ruth as a youth, the daughter of poor Kenyan immigrants living in New England. She meets a Panamanian orphan named Maria and both soon become enmeshed in each other’s lives, befriending and supporting each other without reason or intent, just through a sense of love and belonging.

As both women mature, their paths diverge with Maria finding the affluent creative social circles preferable, while Ruth’s life has become a daily struggle to make ends meet as an artist. Their bond is a beautiful thing and as Wambugu’s prose deepens and delves into the women’s intimate feelings, the story unfurls further with heartbreaking and devastating feminine power.         
https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/

“Middle Spoon” by Alejandro Varela, $30 (Viking)
It’s all about the melodrama, the trials, and the trouble of a particularly messy polyamorous open relationship in Varela’s latest, a triumph of wit, wisdom, and emotional awareness. This epistolary novel is mostly conveyed through a series of heartfelt emails from an unnamed queer man to his former boyfriend, Ben, in the hopes of clearing the air and gaining some semblance of closure.

But their relationship is also enmeshed within the narrator’s central bond with his husband and two children in Brooklyn. Having never experienced rejection like the kind Ben bestowed upon him without warning is distressing and confusing and the only way he knows how to repair his broken heart is through emails to Ben, which move through a few themes, intentions, moods, and machinations.

Varela is a National Book Award finalist, and this is yet another example of his wizardry with plot and prose and the many varietal forms that relationships, whether exquisite or malevolent, can take. This is a writer who knows about and is unafraid of spotlighting the complex inner trappings of contemporary unorthodox queer couplings.   
https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com

Alejandro Varela, in conversation with R.O. Kwon, will be at Book Passage, Sept. 11, 6:30pm. 1 Ferry Bldg., SF. www.bookpassage.com

“The Sunflower Boys” by Sam Wachman, $30 (HarperCollins)
When war destroys the family of two brothers, they are left to fend for themselves on a journey across a dangerous and desolate landscape in queer author Sam Wachman’s heart-wrenching first novel. Together with his mother and younger brother, Yuri, twelve-year-old narrator Artem lives in Chernihiv, Ukraine and pines for a reunion with his father, Tato, who left for America eight years earlier.

Artem also pines for the affections of his best friend Viktor and as their attraction simmers, the Russians invade his homeland, and everything gets turned inside out. His mother and grandfather are slaughtered, but the boys manage to hide, which only leads them into uncertain territory as together, they must flee the exploding war in Ukraine in search of Tato and a family reunion that is long overdue.

The set pieces and scenes of shelters, bombings, cadavers, and gunshots are strikingly resonant and sad, but they make the novel all the more searing and intense. At 25, Cambridge, Massachusetts writer Wachman’s debut novel is an impressive feat of literature in that the book can evoke so much emotion, pain, and wartime trauma, it’s easy to forget it’s fiction. Putting his Ukranian roots into prose, Wachman has produced a work of war and self-discovery that is heartbreaking, moving, and utterly unforgettable.  
https://www.harpercollins.com

“The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and His Mother)” by Rabih Alameddine, $28 (Grove Press)
At 66, San Francisco-based writer Rabih Alameddine’s impressive and award-winning literary oeuvre includes novels like his debut “Koolaids,” and “An Unnecessary Woman,” which, among many others, involve the Lebanese Civil War.

In his latest, we meet 63-year-old Raja, a queer philosophy instructor who lives with his mother in Beirut. Having struggled with the ordeals of COVID-19, the banking industry collapse in Lebanon, and an experience during the 1975 civil war when he was taken as a two-month prisoner to a soldier he ended up deeply befriending, he is more than ready to take a break.

But as calamitous as his life has been, a “free” offer of an all-expenses-paid trip to the U.S. for a residency just might be his final undoing. Or will it? Raja is nothing if not resilient, damaged, clever and quirky, and a narrator with these qualities makes for an immensely fun and entertaining read. Those qualities have also made Alameddine’s other novels successful as well. This one is hilarious, seasoned with history, and utterly brilliant. 
https://groveatlantic.com