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If you loved
Books like On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous
A devastatingly beautiful, poetic excavation of the tender and violent intersections of love, trauma, and queer identity. These 12 books are the closest matches in mood, pace and themes, with what each one shares with On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous.
- melancholic
- luminous
- aching
- haunting
- 01
Time Is a Mother
Ocean Vuong
A tender, devastating exploration of life in the aftermath of profound loss, rendered in breathtakingly precise language.
- 02
The Death of Vivek Oji
Akwaeke Emezi
A tender, devastating portrait of a fiercely beautiful spirit blooming in secret, framed by the profound grief of those left behind.
- 03
Night sky with exit wounds
Ocean Vuong
A devastating and luminous exploration of how history's violence echoes through the body, family, and queer desire.
- 04
To Paradise
Hanya Yanagihara
A sweeping, symphonic epic that shatters the illusion of utopia across three centuries of American longing and heartbreak.
- 05
How much of these hills is gold
C Pam Zhang
A fierce, dust-choked fable that reimagines the American West through the eyes of two orphaned siblings carrying the literal and figurative weight of their ancestry.
- 06
All adults here
Emma Straub
A warm, wry exploration of the messy reality that no one ever really figures out how to be a grown-up.
- 07
Young Mungo
Douglas Stuart
A devastatingly tender exploration of queer first love blooming in the cracks of a brutal, hyper-masculine world.
- 08
The Story of a Marriage
Andrew Sean Greer
A lyrical, quietly devastating exploration of the profound mysteries hidden within a seemingly ordinary marriage.
- 09
The Fifth Season
N. K. Jemisin
A furious, structurally brilliant descent into a dying world where grief and geology are wielded as weapons.
- 10
A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
An emotionally annihilating, deeply intimate epic about the enduring scars of trauma and the fierce, sometimes helpless, power of found family.
- 11
Call Me by Your Name
André Aciman
A sun-drenched, intoxicating plunge into the agonizing beauty of first love and the haunting power of memory.
- 12
Interior Chinatown
Charles Yu
A razor-sharp, formally inventive satire that dismantles the background roles marginalized people are forced to play in their own lives.
