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If you loved
Books like Holding the man
An intimate, heart-wrenching memoir that captures the enduring power of love in the shadow of a devastating epidemic. These 12 books are the closest matches in mood, pace and themes, with what each one shares with Holding the man.
- tender
- melancholic
- bittersweet
- intimate
- 01
The Swimming-Pool Library
Alan Hollinghurst · 1994
An impeccably composed, darkly erotic elegy for a lost era of aristocratic privilege and gay life.
- 02
A single man
Christopher Isherwood
A sharply observed, deeply moving portrait of a single day in the life of a man carrying the invisible weight of profound grief.
- 03
Torch song trilogy
Harvey Fierstein
A fiercely funny and deeply moving exploration of love, loss, and the radical act of demanding respect for who you are.
- 04
Close to the Knives
David Wojnarowicz · 1991
A raw, scathing, and sublimely humorous collection of essays that serves as a fierce personal testimony of queer survival and artistic defiance.
- 05
The hours
Michael Cunningham · 1998
A luminous, deeply interior meditation on the quiet tragedies and fleeting beauties of a single ordinary day.
- 06
Faggots
Larry Kramer · 1978
A frantic, sweat-soaked descent into 1970s gay hedonism that masks a desperate, aching plea for true love.
- 07
Two Boys Kissing
David Levithan
A tender, generation-spanning embrace that connects the ghosts of the past to the defiant joy of the present.
- 08
Dirt music
Tim Winton
An earthy, introspective exploration of womanhood and the quiet rhythms of midlife.
- 09
Less
Andrew Sean Greer
A sparkling, globe-trotting comedy of errors about outrunning heartbreak and accidentally stumbling into grace.
- 10
How to Survive a Plague
David France
An urgent, intimately reported chronicle of the fierce defiance and grassroots science that fought back against a devastating epidemic.
- 11
Giovanni's Room
James Baldwin · 1993
A devastating, beautifully written confession of doomed love and the tragic cost of denying one's own heart.
- 12
Distress
Greg Egan
A dizzying, hyper-intellectual near-future thriller that weaponizes theoretical physics to induce existential vertigo.
