Books like Imogen Binnie

The clearest descendant of Nevada, this acclaimed Women’s Prize–longlisted novel expands Binnie’s messy-trans-woman realism into a brilliant social comedy. Reese, her ex Ames, and Ames’s pregnant boss Katrina begin considering an unconventional family arrangement, and every conversation becomes a minefield of longing, status, gender, and self-deception.

Peters shares Binnie’s willingness to make trans women funny, needy, sexually reckless, and devastatingly insightful. But where Nevada stages the failure of mentorship, Detransition, Baby asks whether damaged people can build forms of kinship without pretending to be healed first. Its sentences are wickedly quotable; its emotional judgments keep shifting under your feet. Few novels have portrayed the politics within trans life with such intimacy or nerve.

Wendy Reimer lives in Winnipeg, working, drinking, scraping by, and leaning on a close circle of trans friends. After a family funeral, she encounters evidence that her late Mennonite grandfather may also have been trans. Plett treats that possibility not as a tidy mystery but as an ache: what can one trans person truly know about another, especially across generations and silence?

Winner of both the Amazon Canada First Novel Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction, Little Fish has the granular truth Nevada readers tend to crave: bad apartments, brittle friendships, money trouble, winter streets, private rituals, and moments of grace that never erase material hardship. Plett’s tenderness is unsentimental and exact. Wendy’s world feels inhabited rather than arranged for an audience, and leaving it hurts.

Paul is a queer shapeshifter in 1993 who can alter his body at will, moving between genders, lovers, scenes, and cities with exuberant appetite. Lawlor takes an impossible premise and uses it to make gender feel more physical, mischievous, and unstable than straightforward realism often can.

If Nevada’s road trip exposes the stories people tell themselves about transition, Paul turns self-invention into a horny, funny picaresque. The novel is steeped in queer music, clothes, bars, books, and arguments, yet its cultural fluency never becomes mere nostalgia. Now firmly a cult favorite, it offers the rare pleasure of a gender-expansive protagonist who is neither symbol nor saint but a restless trickster. Its freedom is infectious.