Recommendations based on "Giovanni's Room: Introduction by Colm Tóibín (Everyman's Library Contemporary Classics Series)"

Published in 1962, this is an emotionally intense novel of love, hatred, race and liberal America in the 1960s. Set in Greenwhich Village, Harlem and France, ANOTHER COUNTRY tells the story of the suicide of jazz-musician Rufus Scott and the friends who search for an understanding of his life and death, discovering uncomfortable truths about themselves along the way.

Mr Loverman

Inspired by E. M. Forster’s novel Howards End, and set in New York three decades after the height of the AIDS epidemic, The Inheritance wrestles with what it means to be a gay man today, exploring relationships and connections across age and social class and asking what one generation’s responsibilities may be to the next. Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance premiered at the Young Vic Theatre, London, in 2018, before transferring to the West End’s Noel Coward Theatre. It premiered on Broadway at the Ethel Barrymore Theatre in 2019. This edition includes revisions made for the Broadway production.

In "Boys Don't Cry", bestselling author Malorie Blackman explores the unchartered territory of teenage fatherhood. You're waiting for the postman - he's bringing your A level results. University, a career as a journalist - a glittering future lies ahead. But when the doorbell rings it's your old girlfriend; and she's carrying a baby. Your baby. You're happy to look after it, just for an hour or two. But then she doesn't come back - and your future suddenly looks very different. Malorie's dramatic new novel will take you on a journey from tears to laughter and back again.

Soon to be a major motion picture directed by Deepa Mehta—coming to Netflix December 10, 2020!An evocative coming-of-age novel about growing up gay in Sri Lanka during the Tamil-Sinhalese conflict—one of the country’s most turbulent and deadly periods.Arjie is “funny.”The second son of a privileged family in Sri Lanka, he prefers staging make-believe wedding pageants with his female cousins to battling balls with the other boys. When his parents discover his innocent pastime, Arjie is forced to abandon his idyllic childhood games and adopt the rigid rules of an adult world. Bewildered by his incipient sexual awakening, mortified by the bloody Tamil-Sinhalese conflicts that threaten to tear apart his homeland, Arjie painfully grows toward manhood and an understanding of his own “different” identity.Refreshing, raw, and poignant, Funny Boy is an exquisitely written, compassionate tale of a boy’s coming-of-age that quietly confounds expectations of love, family, and country as it delivers the powerful message of staying true to one’s self no matter the obstacles.

Billie Holiday describes her early childhood in an East Baltimore ghetto, her career as an internationally acclaimed jazz vocalist, and her years in bondage to a drug habit

In this joyful and impactful picture book, a transgender boy prepares for the first day of school and introduces himself to his family and friends for the first time.Calvin has always been a boy, even if the world sees him as a girl. He knows who he is in his heart and in his mind but he hasn't yet told his family. Finally, he can wait no longer: "I'm not a girl," he tells his family. "I'm a boy--a boy in my heart and in my brain." Quick to support him, his loving family takes Calvin shopping for the swim trunks he's always wanted and back-to-school clothes and a new haircut that helps him look and feel like the boy he's always known himself to be. As the first day of school approaches, he's nervous and the "what-ifs" gather up inside him. But as his friends and teachers rally around him and he tells them his name, all his "what-ifs" begin to melt away.Inspired by the authors' own transgender child and accompanied by warm and triumphant illustrations, this authentic and personal text promotes kindness and empathy, offering a poignant and inclusive back-to-school message: all should feel safe, respected, and welcomed.

The inspiration for the upcoming feature film from Oscar award-winning director Barry Jenkins'Achingly beautiful' GuardianHarlem in the 1970s: the black soul of New York City. Tish is nineteen and the man she loves - her lifelong friend and the father of her unborn child - has been jailed for a crime he did not commit. As their families come together to fight for his freedom, will their love be enough?'Soulful . . . Racial injustice may flatten "the black experience" into one single, fearful, constantly undermined way of life - but black life, black love, is so much larger than that . . . It's one of the signature lessons of Baldwin's work that blackness contains multitudes' Vanity Fair'If Beale Street Could Talk affirms not only love between a man and a woman, but love of a type that is dealt with only rarely in contemporary fiction - that between members of a family' Joyce Carol Oates

You have to wonder why there isn't a word in the English language for the fireworks that go off in your brain when you finally kiss someone you've wanted for years. Or for the intimacy and tenderness you feel as you hold the hand of a suffering friend. A generation after the height of the AIDS crisis, what is it like to be a young gay man in New York? How many words are there now for the different kinds of pain, the different kinds of love? Matthew Lopez's The Inheritance premiered in two parts at the Young Vic Theatre, London, in March 2018. The play transferred to the Noël Coward Theatre, London, in September 2018.

When Tedla, a asexual "bland" who has escaped its sheltered home world, is found trying to end its life, Val saves the alien and learns the devastating secrets of this tortured soul, as Tedla reveals the horrifying truths of the mysterious world of the "blands." Original.