8 of the Best Sophomore Novels

This might be my favorite sophomore novel ever, partially because Plante’s debut was so good I could not imagine anything topping it. Surprise! This creative novel is a love song to punk music, trans women, and queer friendship. Told in two distinct sections set 20 years apart, it’s the fictional memoir of trans musician Tracy St. Cyr and her meandering journey through many different versions of self and community.

There’s almost nothing as exciting as when an author’s second book is nothing like their first one. Zhang’s sophomore novel shares the gorgeous, lyrical prose of her first one—but that’s about it. This one is set in a dystopian future in which a grey haze has settled over the world, and huge swaths of plants and animals have gone extinct. An unnamed chef takes a job at a mysterious restaurant at an elite research facility in Italy and discovers monsters: in herself, in the people she works with, in the people she loves. It’s a stunning, layered book.

I haven’t yet read Yun’s first book, Shelter, but after having devoured this one last year, it’s on my list. O Beautiful is a remarkable novel about a journalist who returns to her small North Dakota hometown to cover the oil boom. While there, she uncovers the fraught web of power, greed, silence, desperation, racism, and exploitation that defines the place she grew up. It’s as much about how and why we tell stories as it is about one specific story. It’s a haunting book; I haven’t stopped thinking about it since I read it.

Look, I won’t lie: there’s something magical about authors whose books come out years and years apart. Torres’s debut, We the Animals, came out in 2011. Is Blackouts worth the 13-year wait? Yes! It’s a sprawling and creative novel about queer history that defies categorization of any kind. It’s a conversation, an archive, a story-within-a-story, a meditation on queer generational change. You probably haven’t read anything like it.

I know I’m not the only reader who gets a little bit scared when an author whose debut I loved releases a sophomore novel. Will it be as good? The answer is almost always yes and is absolutely yes in the case of Sonora Reyes’s second book. This novel is full of the same complex characters, queer joy, bits of hilarity, and careful, serious consideration of tough subjects that made their debut so special. If you’ve been sleeping on this one—stop!

This book has gotten a fair bit of attention (rightly so, it’s wonderful), but before I also sing its praises, let me take a moment to beg you to read McKenzie’s debut novel, The Summer We Got Free, which is an underrated queer masterpiece. Okay, and now that you’ve added that one to your TBR, I can tell you about her sophomore novel, which is a warm and hilarious book about queer family, falling in love, Philadelphia, what it means to be a mother (or not) and getting your shit together.

Set at a fictional School for the Deaf in Ohio, this novel follows the lives of three characters during one tumultuous year. There’s a new student who’s never been around other Deaf people before; the headmaster, a child of Deaf adults who’s trying to run the school and save her marriage; and the school’s golden boy whose life and understanding of his family changes when his sister is born hearing. Through these characters and their various entanglements, Nović explores a slew of issues facing the Deaf community today—and tells a compelling story while she’s at it.