93 books like Last Call

My overwhelming feeling after finishing this book was gratitude. I felt so grateful to Chanel Miller and to all the women who somehow find the courage and capacity to speak out about sexual assault.

Miller writes skillfully and devastatingly about the details of her own highly publicized attack on the Stanford Campus. I was glad to get to know the human being behind the headlines and to read an honest and meticulous account of the long legal process that follows such a harrowing event. I devoured this approachable, relatable, fearless book quickly, unable to put it down.

Gabby Petito. Natalee Holloway. Laci Peterson. These names probably sound familiar. Lauren Cho, Stephany Flores, and Latoyia Figueroa might not. This illustrates what news anchor Gwen Ifill dubbed “missing white woman syndrome,” the disproportionate media coverage in missing persons cases that attractive, upper-middle-class white women receive.

McDiarmid’s moving book illustrates this phenomenon, following the cases of thousands of Indigenous women who have disappeared from a stretch of road in British Columbia dubbed “The Highway of Tears.” For decades, the cases garnered little media attention until a white woman named Nicole Hoar disappeared in 2002, bringing more resources and coverage.

In painstaking detail, this immersive and necessary book follows several of these previously ignored women’s lives, illustrating the systemic issues that failed the victims and their loved ones.

As a Harvard undergrad, Cooper hears a story about an anthropology professor who murdered a female graduate student with whom he was having an affair, burning her body with cigarette butts and surrounding her in red ochre.

This “macabre legend” illustrates a common critique of true crime—a victim provided no name and no identity beyond the way she was brutalized. A former New Yorker editorial staff member, Cooper performed meticulous research on the 1969 murder, debunking the affair rumor and instead exploring a more interesting story about memory, institutional power, and misogyny in academia.

She also excavates the story of the crime’s victim, 23-year-old Jane Britton. Full of twists and turns, this real-life whodunit provides an exacting portrait of who Jane was and what her loved ones lost.

While on assignment for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, Connors was raped by a man recently released from prison. Before, he lets her go, he tells her not to contact the police, warning her, “[…] I will find you.”

The phrase becomes the through line of Connors’ book, which is both about her quest to find a way forward after the assault and about her journey to uncover her assailant’s past and the reasons he might have committed this crime. The result is a poignant look at both the trauma left in crime’s wake as well as the societal influences that cause crime to occur in the first place.

If you’ve ever wondered about where the terms “coming out,” “tea room,” or “fairy” came from, this book has the answers. But more importantly, this book showed me the extent to which my preconceived notions about the relationship between gender and sexuality were simply wrong.

Chauncey’s careful and readable reconstruction of gay communities in early twentieth-century New York illustrates very clearly that ideas of masculinity and deviance and the meanings attached to sex between men are socially constructed and change over time.

His story also showed me how much history can hide in plain sight and how there are still so many stories left to tell.

The novel is set in three end-of-century time-frames—1893, 1993, and 2093. In the opening, set in a mansion on Washington Square in New York, we discover we’re in an America where same-sex marriage has been legal for a long time, and a young man is about to run off with a suitor his father distrusts (a new version of a Henry James plot). The next section is in Hawaii, the colonized Paradise, where descendant characters (with the same set of names, juggled) stumble and grab what they can of freedom and love. My favorite section is the last, where characters with those recurring names are in a New York of “cooling suits” and “decontamination chambers” and totalitarian rule. This is a wild and really quite brilliant book, whose sprawling parts are fueled by a searing vision.  

I loved this book from page one because I instantly wanted to be the main character, Max Moody’s, friend. He’s incredibly relatable and has impeccable taste in music.

His love interest, Chasten, was charming and sweet, and the combination of their personalities made them easy to root for. Plus, I laughed out loud and smiled all the way through their love story. 

I was mesmerized by this masterfully written and engrossing page-turner that emotionally landed me in the intimate orbit of Anthony Malone and Andrew Southerland, the book’s two main characters.

Honest and unflinching, it describes a life and culture unknown to me in such a beautiful, romantic way that, although intrinsically tragic, I regretted not being a part of it.

Holleran illuminates a period essential to understanding LGBTQ history, “Imagine a pleasure in which the moment of satisfaction is simultaneous with a moment of destruction: to kiss is to poison; lifting to your lips this face after what you have dreamed, long for, the face shatters every time.”

I’ve been singing the praises of Silvera’s They Both at the End for so long, I was a little nervous about the prequel that came out this year. What if it couldn’t hold up?

Silly me: Silvera knows exactly what he’s doing, setting a doomed romance against the dawn of a new technology, and keeping the reader invested despite knowing the young lovers are on the clock. It’s a romance that reads like a thriller. I’m a sucker for both!

You know what I like about Donald Strachey? His boyfriend. I’m kidding—Strachey’s fine.

He’s a smart, tough detective in the hard-boiled tradition so of course I like him, but do you ever think way more of someone because they had the good taste to pick the partner they did? Timothy Callahan is a Jesuit-educated political aide, former Peace Corps volunteer and one of those characters who gets called a “moral centre” because they are one.

I was half in love with him before he (accurately) dissed Mother Teresa but I adored him after that. I came to the Strachey books for canny, realistic and never twee gay detective fiction but I’ve stayed for Timmy. He’s a soothing, reaffirming, hilarious wonder and you never know—he might smack-talk Gandhi next.