Safe Place by Jay Northcote

Where do you go when your home is no longer a safe place? Alex is about to turn eighteen and is firmly in the closet. He’s been biding his time, waiting to escape to uni, and finally come out away from the oppressive influence of his homophobic father. When he flunks his exams, he’s stuck in the small town of Porthladock—and what’s worse is that he’s working for his dad. The only thing that makes it bearable is Cam. Cam’s comfortable with his bisexuality, but he doesn’t broadcast it. Young, free, and single, his social life revolves… Read more

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homophobia
  • Transphobia & deadnaming
  • Adult-minor relationship & dubious consent scenario (‘dubcon’)*
  • Alcohol consumption

Context : Relationship between a 17-year-old, who turns 18 during of the book, and a 23-year-old.

A Safe Girl to Love: Stories by Casey Plett

Eleven unique short stories that stretch from a rural Canadian Mennonite town to a hipster gay bar in Brooklyn, featuring young trans women stumbling through loss, sex, harassment, and love. These stories, shiny with whiskey and prairie sunsets, rattling subways and neglected cats, show growing up as a trans girl can be charming, funny, frustrating, or sad, but never will it be predictable.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homophobia & transphobia
  • Sexual assault
  • Depression
  • Attempted suicide recounted & self-harm
  • Alcohol consumption, drug use & smoking

Some Kind of Famous by Ava Wilder

It’s been a decade since Merritt Valentine’s peak as a celebrated singer-songwriter… and her subsequent career-ending mental breakdown. Since then, she’s abandoned the glitz of Los Angeles to move in with her sister, Olivia, in the sleepy Colorado ski town of Crested Peak, hoping to heal her lingering emotional wounds of the spotlight. Life in Crested Peak would be uncomplicated if not for Merritt’s inconvenient crush on the local contractor and handyman, Nikolaos Petrakis. Niko is disarmingly handsome and too kind-hearted to ever be right for the complex and prickly… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Slut-shaming & mentions of homophobia (secondary characters)
  • Minor fatphobia & mention of weight gain
  • Parental abandonment & familial estrangement
  • Statutory rape recounted (protagonist was 14-years-old and her sibling’s brother was ~roughly~ 19-years-old)
  • Workplace sexual harassment of a teen mentioned
  • Divorce & infidelity recounted (the protagonist’s ex-husband cheated on her, and she cheated in previous relationships)
  • Panic attacks recounted
  • Dissociation, Borderline Personality Disorder & Complex PTSD (protqagonist)
  • Protagonist in recovery for substance and alcohol addictions after an attempted suicide by overdose in the past, including on-page & recounted drug use & abuse and alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Unplanned teen pregnancy recounted & mentions of a pregnant secondary character
  • Emesis
  • Death of a father mentioned
  • Animal death mentioned (pet cat)

Babel-17 by Samuel R. Delany

In the far future, after human civilization has spread through the galaxy, communications begin to arrive in an apparently alien language. They appear to threaten invasion, but in order to counter the threat, the messages must first be understood.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Fatphobia & body shaming, homophobia & misogyny
  • Suicide
  • Psychosis
  • Genocide
  • Kidnapping & captivity

All Are Welcome by Liz Parker

Tiny McAllister never thought she’d get married. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she didn’t think girls from Connecticut married other girls. Yet here she is with Caroline, the love of her life, at their destination wedding on the Bermuda coast. In attendance—their respective families and a few choice friends. The conflict-phobic Tiny hopes for a beautiful weekend with her bride-to-be. But as the weekend unfolds, it starts to feel like there’s a skeleton in every closet of the resort. From Tiny’s family members who find the world is changing at an uncomfortable speed, to… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homophobia
  • Alcohol consumption & abuse
  • Drug use

Alice Austen Lived Here by Alex Gino

Sam is very in touch with their own queer identity. They’re nonbinary, and their best friend, TJ, is nonbinary as well. Sam’s family is very cool with it… as long as Sam remembers that nonbinary kids are also required to clean their rooms, do their homework, and try not to antagonize their teachers too much. The teacher-respect thing is hard when it comes to Sam’s history class, because their teacher seems to believe that only Dead Straight Cis White Men are responsible for history. When Sam’s home borough of… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Queerphobia & coming out themes
  • Racism
  • Police violence mentioned

A + E 4ever by I. Merey

Asher Machnik is a teenage boy cursed with a beautiful androgynous face. Guys punch him, girls slag him and by high school he’s developed an intense fear of being touched. Art remains his only escape from an otherwise emotionally empty life. Eulalie Mason is the lonely, tough-talking dyke from school who befriends Ash. The only one to see and accept all of his sides as a loner, a fellow artist and a best friend, she’s starting to wonder if ash is ever going to see all of her….

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homophobia & coming out themes
  • Statutory rape
  • Bullying

The Affairs of the Falcóns by Melissa Rivero

Ana Falcón, along with her husband Lucho and their two young children, has fled the economic and political strife of Peru for a chance at a new life in New York City in the 1990s. Being undocumented, however, has significantly curtailed the family’s opportunities: Ana is indebted to a loan shark who calls herself Mama, and is stretched thin by unceasing shifts at her factory job. To make matters worse, Ana must also battle both criticism from Lucho’s cousin—who has made it obvious the family is not welcome to stay in her spare room for much longer—and escalating and unwant… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Racism & colourism
  • Homophobia
  • Rape mentioned & sexual assault
  • Abortion
  • Deportation

The Women Could Fly by Megan Giddings

Josephine Thomas has heard every conceivable theory about her mother’s disappearance. That she was kidnapped. Murdered. That she took on a new identity to start a new family. That she was a witch. This is the most worrying charge because in a world where witches are real, peculiar behavior raises suspicions and a woman–especially a Black woman–can find herself on trial for witchcraft. But fourteen years have passed since her mother’s disappearance, and now Jo is finally ready to let go of the past. Yet her future is in doubt. The State mandates that all women marry by… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Misogyny, homophobia & racism (theme)
  • Murder & disappearance of a mother
  • Animal death
  • Bullying

The Word is Murder by Anthony Horowitz

One bright spring morning in London, Diana Cowper – the wealthy mother of a famous actor – enters a funeral parlor. She is there to plan her own service. Six hours later she is found dead, strangled with a curtain cord in her own home. Enter disgraced police detective Daniel Hawthorne, a brilliant, eccentric investigator who’s as quick with an insult as he is to crack a case. Hawthorne needs a ghost writer to document his life; a Watson to his Holmes. He chooses Anthony Horowitz. Drawn in against his will, Horowitz soon finds himself a the center of a story he cannot control. Hawthorne… Read more.

Goodreads • The Story Graph

Trigger and Content Warnings

  • Homophobia
  • Drugging
  • Suicidal ideation
  • Brain injury
  • Death of a child
  • Murder by strangulation
  • Car accident