Mad Eden

A trans telehealth worker’s safety comes under threat just as they’ve found happiness with their partner in the brilliant debut novel from Thomas (Manywhere: Stories). Ro and their partner, Liam, live in a remote cabin in rural Florida, where Liam toils as a translator and Ro serves as a patient navigator for the Southern Trans Care Access Taskforce. The pair also offer shelter to a trans teen named Quentin before he starts college in Missouri. Recently diagnosed with autism, Ro occasionally loses the ability to speak and communicates instead through ASL. They become fascinated with an anonymously published fantasy story titled “Mad Eden,” which is sourced from words used in a scholarly article on autism. Ro and Liam struggle financially, but they’re happy together (“Wring our bodies, and the joy would drip from us like dirty water,” Ro narrates). Things take a turn when video from Ro’s appointment with a woman who claimed to be seeking gender-affirming care for her trans child turns up in an anti-trans newsletter. Further complicating matters, Ro learns that Quentin, now enrolled in Missouri, needs their help. Lacing traditional narrative elements with snippets of social media posts, emails, and chapters from “Mad Eden,” Thomas’s gorgeously constructed story explores difficulties of love, as Ro, a refreshingly complex protagonist, weighs their idyllic bliss with Liam against their desire to help those in need. This luminous novel is impossible to forget. Agent: Meredith Kaffel Simonoff, Gernert Co. (June)