Gengoroh Tagame

My Brother’s Husband is world renowned graphic novelist Gengoroh Tagame’s first all-ages graphic  novel, produced in two volumes. Tagame’s book deals with homophobia in Japan as Yaichi, a single parent, and his daughter Kana are visited by Mike, the Canadian husband of his estranged and now dead brother.

The small family dutifully albeit reluctantly, takes in widower Mike as he seeks to learn about his husband’s past. The book gently alludes to the quiet and subtle everyday bigotry common to Japan that drove Ryogi to leave while Yaichi, with his daughter’s assistance, faces what was a painful past and gradually comes to an understanding that being gay is just another way of being human.

Not only is the unfolding story touching, it is also, for a non-Japanese reader, fascinating and  worth conquering reading from back to front as Yaichi comes to challenge his own and his community’s behaviour and beliefs, and Mike in turn learns more of Japan and its attitude to homosexuality.

Rhianna King

Rhianna King’s Birds of a Feather is a funny, poignant and charming debut novel about questioning who you are and what you might become.

Feeling as if she doesn’t belong to her bohemian and outgoing family, Beth buys a lottery ticket to prove that she can be spontaneous. Upon winning, she decides to spend it on her grandma, with whom she shares a special relationship. This results in her helping her grandmother track down her first love.

What she believes to be a simple adventure becomes much more as she discovers her grandmother’s past – a woman she loved and a relationship thwarted by the conservatism of the day – and leads to Beth re-evaluating her own life and her own desires.

An easy and enjoyable read!

Hannah Coleman

On his seventeenth birthday, constantly bullied Ben – or lil benny, as his bullies called him – discovered that his touch could transform one of those bullies into a girl.

This unexpected ‘gift’ leads to his expulsion, and a family breakdown as he accidentally changes his brother and then his father.  Starting at a new school, Ben wears gloves, claiming he has a skin condition. But his travails with his ‘gift’ continues, and, despite knowing what he can do is wrong, he finds himself envying those he has transformed.

Hannah Coleman’s self published tour de force is somewhat long, but an interesting and worthwhile read as Ben’s life changes and evolves.