Photo Credit: Ksenya Blokhina
It’s that time of year: the lakes beckon, with their dirty shores and FKK offshoots, promising tan lines and abandoned inhibitions. For a lake day, you want a book that’s hot enough that it forces you to take a cold lake plunge, while capturing summer’s strange, sizzling energy. We can’t think of anyone better to capture that spirit than avid lake swimmer Leon Craig, whose gothic queer novel The Decadence explores sultriness to an extreme. Out in paperback on August 6 through Sceptre Books, it follows six hedonistic friends on holiday at a haunted house, so preoccupied with their own interpersonal sexual politics that they hardly notice that they’re in serious danger. She brings that same energy to these recommendations: indulgent, feral, complex. These are the books for days that make you sweat, whether you’re making eyes at someone across Teufelsee or chasing the wild boar who just stole your underwear into a dark Grunewald forest.
The Seers
Sulaiman Addonaia, 2025
Hannah is a young Eritrean refugee who has found herself homeless in London after her foster mother’s death. Now she’s camping out in Bloomsbury amid the ghosts of poets and writers, with only her mother’s diaries for company. After a gruelling journey to the UK, Hannah is at the mercy of the British asylum system but remains determined to carve out meaning for herself. She’s insistent upon her own pleasure. She defies the ‘perfect victim’ narrative often expected of refugees. This highly original stream of consciousness novel tackles the taboo subject of displaced people’s sexuality with confidence and charm.
Welcome to the Chaoskampf
Jane Flett, 2026
In the sweltering humidity of the New Orleans summer, Marcy is reaching a breaking point. Her strait-laced husband won’t stop pressuring her to have a baby and a stigmata-like wound has just opened on her chest. She becomes obsessively attracted to a rag-tag group of troublemakers who seduce her into leaving her crumbling marriage and joining them at a remote compound overlooking the ocean. The group is presided over by a charismatic figure known as Mutti and sessions of randomised group sex, trials by ordeal and even cannibalism ensue. Flett’s no-holds-barred imagining of an apocalyptic unleashing of the group’s collective id in service of an ancient chaos goddess isn’t just a sidelong look at dysfunctional queer microsocieties; it’s also a horny, rollicking good time.
Cleanness
Garth Greenwell, 2020
This novel in vignettes is all about cruising, intimacy and relationships. The narrator is based in Bulgaria, where he can’t openly show affection for other men, forcing reflections on how he was shaped by the fears of his own post-AIDS-era youth. The capital, Sofia, is also a place of many formative experiences, a place he’s preparing to leave behind. Through counselling a young distraught student who comes out to him after class, his sadomasochistic encounters with strangers and a complex romance with R, his semi-closeted Portuguese lover, the narrator comes to a deeper understanding of shame, freedom and the often fraught interplay between the two.
Jawbone
Mónica Ojeda, translated by Sarah Booker, 2018
This book felt like it rewired my brain. It sinisterly depicts a pair of teenage girls, devoted to one another and to the mysterious, who start playing oft-homoerotic games in the ruins of an abandoned house. Their traumatised teacher, Miss Clara, already hovering on the edge of sanity after mistreatment by her mother and a violent home invasion, decides to kidnap her pupil Fernanda. In flashbacks, we see Fernanda and her best friend, the manipulative Anneliese, become drawn into rituals worshipping their invented drag-queen deity, the White God. It’s a dark and haunting novel about women’s capacity for madness and evil.
Snakes and Earrings
Hitomi Kanehara, translated by David Karashima, 2003
This Japanese cult classic follows Lui, a young hostess in Tokyo who plunges ever deeper into the world of DIY body modification, seeking to distinguish herself from her peers. Caught between her boyfriend Ama, the first man she ever met who also has a forked tongue, and the sadistic tattoo artist Shiba, she must navigate a world without rules, driven by desire and vengeance. A provocative dive into early-2000s Japanese subculture, Snakes and Earrings is told in a spare style that belies its disturbing contents. This account of obsession and transformation won the author, Hitomi Kanehara, the prestigious Akutagawa Prize when she was just 21.
The Berlin launch for The Decadence is on Aug 12 at Chapters, alongside Anna Maconochie’s Diamond Life.