Announcing our books for 2026
We are excited to announce our titles for 2026, featuring debut authors, authors new to Cipher, and returning favourites. From novels-in-verse to explorations of queers in suburbia, from catastrophic breakdowns to ecstatic road trips, our 2026 list shows that there are many ways to live a queer life, and even more ways to write a queer book.
Dive in to what’s in store below.
Mirrorstage
A raw and profound novel in verse about mental health, addiction, queerness and shame that explores ideas of hybridity and identity.
Following their discharge from hospital, Mirrorstage follows its narrator on a road trip through the grey, liminal landscapes of modern Britain. As they pass graffitied bus shelters, construction sites and flooded motorways, factories and high-rises, the narrator’s internal and external journeys begin to converge, leading them down paths they have been trying to avoid: the mental illness and substance use that led them to the inpatient ward, the uneasy balance of their own gender identity, their troubled relationship with their estranged father, the perils and pleasures of the queer scene, and the shame that has haunted them throughout their life.
Woven around the psychoanalytic concept of its title, Mirrorstage is an experimental fable exploring the boundaries of selfhood and literary forms, told in fragments of prose and verse that are equal parts heartbreaking, sexy, and witty.
Peter Scalpello is a writer and psychotherapist from Glasgow, based in London. Their work has appeared in Five Dials, Granta, The London Magazine and The New York Times, among other publications. Peter’s book of poetry, Limbic (Cipher Press, 2022), was Highly Commended by the Forward Prize for Best First Collection, shortlisted for the Books Are My Bag Readers Award for Poetry, and adapted into a stage production at the University of Edinburgh. Mirrorstage is their second book.
Little F
A gutsy and joyful road trip of a novel by cult favourite author of Black Wave and Valencia.
In Spencer’s fantasies, the breezy, queer streets of Provincetown are utopia, a place where he can be free. And when a violent attack in his suburban Arizona schoolyard sends him to the hospital, he decides queer utopia can’t wait. One night, with the help of his best friend, the teenage witch Joy, he hitches a ride to find it.
What follows is a cross-country road odyssey throughout the USA, taking Spencer from new moon rituals in Arizona canyons to Texas bus stations, from the luxe drag stages of Houston’s Montrose district to the jazz-soaked streets of New Orleans and beyond. This new novel from Michelle Tea tells the story, by turns raw, romantic, and sweet, of a sheltered boy taking his first leap into queer life, among all the complicated queers who live it.
Michelle Tea is the author of over twenty books of fiction, memoir, poetry and children's literature. Her autofiction, Valencia, a cult classic, won the Lambda Literary Award for Best Fiction. Her essay collection Against Memoir was awarded the PEN/America Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for The Art of the Essay. Tea is also the recipient of awards from The Rona Jaffe Foundation, as well as the Guggenheim Foundation. The founder of Drag Queen Story Hour, she has received honours from the American Library Association and Logo Television. Tea curated the Sister Spit Books series at City Lights Publisher, and founded the ongoing imprint Amethyst Editions at The Feminist Press.
A Pizza Hut, A Pizza Hut, Kentucky Fried Chicken and a Pizza Hut
Where should a person be? A novel against the narrative imposed upon the suburbs as a place queers leave.
Lazarus is back and from the brink and this time… she’s going home to her mum’s in Watford! Returning to the town she couldn’t wait to leave, Laz busies herself working on a Yiddish translation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle and playing video games. With no capacity to think about her future and trying to forget her past, what will emerge out of this strange time-filling mixture?
Meanwhile, Herb is yet to peek over the horizon of Watford Highstreet. Pulling espresso shots, he dreams of being transferred to a Nero branch far, far away and starting a new life writing big gay plays for a big gay world out there. But beside him slinging coffees his best friend Lara is holding fast to her hometown. When Lara and regular customer Cynthia fall in love, her dedication to being fully in the here and now only swells like the canals she grew up on continue to—then what?
Cynthia is a high-femme roboteer here to finally finish her PhD, teaching her way through robot post-doc hell, stamping on the brains of robo-boys as she goes and following in the footsteps of her old butch professor, ‘Prof’. Watford will use Cynthia’s inventions to reinvent itself into the communised Watford Underburg, but not yet. Meantime, Laz is home playing video games and waiting for love to come along and if it does, it better be Butch, specifically: Butch Lichenstein.
A Pizza Hut… asks, where should a person be? Writing against the narrative imposed upon the suburbs as a place queers leave, the novel traces the lives of a scruffy bunch of queers in Watford and plays out the radical implications of staying put.
Hannah Levene is a writer living in Norwich, UK. Her novel Greasepaint was published by Nightboat Books in February 2024. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from Roehampton University exploring The Composition of New Butch Literature. Various prose, poetry and conversations have been published at Lit Hub, Bomb Mag, Fruit Journal, Hotel, Data Bleed, Blackbox Manifold, and FENWOMEN. She is currently working on a collaborative novel with D Mortimer titled Abraham’s Bosom.
Big Man
A tender, daring novel which turns a lens on what it means to age as a queer person.
Big Man follows the life of Big, a middle-aged, Black British queer man who lives a gentle life with his boyfriend, Little, in their home in East London. Big and Little enjoy drinks with their friends, holidays, homeware, and running together along the Hackney canals. Big came of age in the club scene under the watchful eye of Mother, an African American trans woman who made both a home and a name for herself in London, her house a refuge for wayward queer youth like Big. When he finds out Mother is releasing a biography, the two reconnect after decades of distance, and Big finds himself having to confront a long-repressed assault that opens old – and new – wounds.
A tender, daring novel full of gentle humour, Big Man explores themes of identity, aging, sex, family, and trauma, turning a lens on what it means to age as a queer person, while being a double-edged love letter to the people and places that make us.
Dean Atta is an award-winning Black British writer from London known for his heartfelt storytelling rooted in his Greek Cypriot and Jamaican heritage. He writes poetry, fiction and nonfiction for all ages. For adult readers, his poetry collection, I Am Nobody’s Nigger, was shortlisted for the Polari First Book Prize, and his memoir, Person Unlimited: An Ode to My Black Queer Body, received praise from Michael Rosen as ‘wonderfully original’. His young adult verse novels are The Black Flamingo, Only on the Weekends, and I Can’t Even Think Straight. The Black Flamingo won the Stonewall Book Award and was shortlisted for the Carnegie Medal and Jhalak Prize. Malorie Blackman praised the book, saying, ‘I loved every word.’ Dean has also contributed to middle-grade anthologies like Happy Here: 10 stories from Black British Authors & Illustrators and the instant no. 1 New York Times bestseller Black Boy Joy: 17 Stories Celebrating Black Boyhood. His picture book, Confetti, illustrated by Alea Marley, is a colourful celebration of love and life. Additionally, Dean is a screenwriter and executive producer of the animated short film Two Black Boys in Paradise, which was selected for the BFI Flare: London LGBTIQ+ Film Festival and numerous others worldwide.
IN/OUT
A daring, darkly hilarious novel about a young queer on the brink of catastrophe.
IN/OUT follows the morbid mundanity of its narrator’s routine: hiding from responsibility, sliding deeper into substance misuse and being financially supported by a mother who brands mental health an ‘invention of North London hippies’.
The narrator was ‘normal’ once – he held up a job at a fashion magazine (that his mother got him) and wore nice clothes and showered and cleaned his teeth and bitched about his boss (one of his mother’s clients, Amanda). Now, the only people who visit are his busy, narcissistic mother, his even more irksome stepsister, Olivia, and the men he finds on Grindr to pay for his meals.
Set in the run up to the Brexit Referendum, In/Out is a darkly hilarious and at times harrowing portrait of a young queer on the brink of catastrophe, exploring themes of masculinity, class, family, sexual assault, addiction, and mental health. A daring novel about being completely untethered, by a bold, exciting new literary voice.
Joe Conroy is a writer from Liverpool. A graduate of Drama Studio London, IN/OUT marks his debut novel.