Noted back-country climber David Oates is perhaps best known for Paradise Wild, his manifesto on the way humans fit into the natural world. In that book and in The Mountains of Paris, a recurring theme is his upbringing in a conservative religious household (“I am the gay son they never wanted”).

            What makes this memoir special to some reviewers is that it is a creative nonfiction memoir that involves two women. In it, the narrator recounts her infatuation as a graduate student with an unnamed woman she meets at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In the Dream House is a phantasmagoria of Machado’s feelings about an abusive relationship with a charming, unstable, upper-class woman years after it ended.

  How We Fight for Our Lives: A Memoir by Saeed Jones Simon & Schuster. 193 pages, $26.     HOW WE FIGHT for Our Lives is a deeply compelling and personal memoir about growing up black and gay in a world where being either can be challenging, and the combination can be deadly. Saeed Jones, authorMore

            Another important moment in the book comes in a coda that ties up many loose strings, even as it leaves a big one dangling in the form of a last-minute character who hasn’t been present but who seems, in retrospect, to have haunted the story unseen. Just what this character has been up to all this time is a question you may raise upon completing this wonderfully complex novel.

SET in Communist-era Poland in 1980, Tomasz Jedrowski’s first novel, Swimming in the Dark, is a compelling and tragic story in which two young men fall passionately in love.

IN 1977, the year in which Carolina De Robertis’ novel, Cantoras, opens, Cabo Polonio was a remote fishing village, a rocky yet serene outcropping on the coast of Uruguay. When the novel begins, its five main characters—Romina, Flaca, Paz, Malena, and Anita a.k.a. La Venus—arrive at the village late at night, having endured a five-hour-long bus ride … They are cantoras, which we learn is a slang term for queer women.