Jenny Fran Davis’s Dykette is a sharp, funny, claustrophobic novel about queer friendship, desire, performance, jealousy, class, taste, and the various humiliations of being seen too clearly by people who are also busy staging themselves.

Set around an upstate holiday gathering, it follows Sasha as she enters the orbit of a wealthier, older, self-consciously artistic queer social world — the kind where everyone is reading the room, curating the room, and quietly poisoning the room.

The novel is very contemporary in its anatomy of intimacy as social theatre: couples, exes, aspirational politics, cultural capital, erotic resentment, and the low-grade panic of being both excluded and observed. A strong fit for readers of queer literary fiction, social satire, messy-group-dynamics novels, and books that understand that a dinner party can become a minor emotional war crime without anyone technically raising their voice.

Henry Holt paperback, first edition, first printing, 2023. Very good second-hand condition with light shelfwear and minor edge wear.