Three Queer Books About Moral Complexity and Dark Desires

When queer characters get to be complicated

The media this week is discussing queer villains and moral complexity in fiction. That is a good moment to look at three books that do exactly this. None of these characters are simply good or simply bad. All three books ask what it means to want something badly. They span decades and continents. One is a classic thriller, one a recent Italian novel, and one a French memoir. Together they make a strong argument: queer literature is most interesting when it refuses easy answers. For more queer books that take unexpected angles, see also Three Queer Books About Spies, Secrets, and Double Lives.

Patricia Highsmith — The Price of Salt (1952, W. W. Norton)

Highsmith published this novel under a pseudonym. That says something about 1952. But the book itself is remarkably calm about its subject. Two women meet in a department store. One is nineteen and adrift. The other is older, married, and in the middle of a divorce. They fall in love and drive across America together. What follows is not a tragedy. That alone made the book extraordinary for its time.

Highsmith is best known for her criminals and her paranoia. Here she writes something quieter. The tension is not between good and evil. It is between wanting a life and being allowed to have one. The prose is spare and precise. Nothing is explained more than necessary.

The book was republished under Highsmith's real name in 1990 as Carol. It was adapted into a film in 2015. A Dutch translation exists: Carol, published by De Arbeiderspers. Available through most bookshops and online at Bol.com or the publisher's website.

This is the right book for readers who want a classic that has aged well. It is also for anyone who thinks queer fiction from the mid-twentieth century must end in punishment. This one does not.

Viola Di Grado — Hollow Heart (Cuore cavo, 2013 / English translation 2017, Restless Books)

This is a short, strange novel from an Italian writer born in 1987. The narrator is dead. She is watching her own decomposition and thinking about the life she left behind. That life included a suffocating relationship with her mother and a love affair that consumed her completely.

Di Grado writes about the body with clinical precision and genuine strangeness. The queerness here is not the central drama but it shapes everything. The narrator's desires — for women, for dissolution, for disappearance — are treated as one continuous thing. The book is uncomfortable in the best sense.

The English translation by Antonia Lloyd-Jones is clean and keeps Di Grado's rhythm. A Dutch translation does not appear to exist at the time of writing. The English edition is available through Restless Books and international online retailers.

This is not for everyone. It is for readers who like literary fiction that pushes at limits. It is also short enough that even if it unsettles you, it does not overstay its welcome.

Abdellah Taïa — Infidels (Infidèles, 2012 / English translation 2014, Seven Stories Press)

Taïa was born in Morocco in 1973. He was the first publicly gay Arab writer to come out in his home country. His books draw heavily on his own life. Infidels is not a straightforward memoir but it reads like one. It moves between a young man growing up poor in Salé and a woman named Jallal who reinvents herself across two continents.

The moral complexity here is not about crime. It is about survival. Characters lie, abandon each other, and make choices that are hard to defend. Taïa does not defend them. He describes them. The result is a book that feels honest in a way that more comfortable fiction does not.

The French original is available through Éditions du Seuil. The English translation by Alison L. Strayer is published by Seven Stories Press. A Dutch translation does not appear to exist. Both editions are available online and through specialist bookshops.

This book is for readers who want to understand a world far from their own. It is also for anyone who has read Édouard Louis and wants something that covers similar emotional territory from a different geography. For more on literary traditions and queer authors who shaped them, see Three Queer Books About Canon, Reading, and Literary History.

Three books, one honest question

What these three books share is refusal. Highsmith refuses the sad ending. Di Grado refuses to make death neat or meaningful. Taïa refuses to make his characters sympathetic in simple ways. All three are better for it. Queer literature does not have to be about overcoming. Sometimes it is about wanting, failing, surviving, or not surviving. These three books know that. They are worth reading in any order.