For nearly as long as I’ve been a reader, I’ve sought out books about/by people who were preoccupied by ideas about how and where we belong. At first, I used to look for stories with characters who felt they didn’t belong in the same ways that I felt I didn’t belong. But, over time, I found it more interesting to see how different characters’ situations can be and still they feel similarly about not fitting in, not belonging.

In one of the most frequently challenged/banned books, George M. Johnson’s All Boys Aren’t Blue (2020), George doesn’t even kiss another boy until thirty pages from the end of the book. (Although identifying as he/him while writing, they now identify as non-binary: the narrative triumphs the concept of fluidity from start to stop.)

There’s talk of both challenges and joys of being an effeminate boy in elementary school, about preferring to play Double Dutch with the girls at recess to playing sports with the boys, all described in direct and simple terms.

But it seems possible that the most subversive idea in this memoir is the willingness to question boundaries and expectations, to simply allow people to express and explore themselves.

Nnedi Okorafor’s LaGuardia (2019) was inspired partly by her Nigerian parents’ experiences having emigrated to America in 1969 (and staying, unexpectedly, because of the Biafran War) and partly by her own experience stopped at customs because she was wearing headgear (she wasn’t: this is how her hair was described to another border official).

What does it mean to be viewed as an alien?

She describes herself as being weary of dystopian narratives like her own Who Fears Death (pure dystopia) and excited by stories like Lagoon and Binti (set in the same universe as this story) for their more optimistic view. LaGuardia is brightly coloured and good fun to read—and the “aliens” are the best part.

Little Dog, in Ocean Vuong’s first novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019), lives with his mom and grandmother, who came to Hartford, Connecticut from Vietnam, with a legacy of wartime trauma.

There’s a sense of suspension between beauty and pain, with Vuong’s lyrical language sometimes offering respite and sometimes heightening the despair. Little Dog’s injuries—he absorbs blows of all sorts—leave deep wounds: that’s the hinge on which this story turns.

“It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter. We’ll have to cut it open, you and I, like a newborn lifted, red and trembling, from the just-shot doe.”

In one of my favourite scenes, his mother pockets the payment made by a woman who comes to the salon before opening hours.

This economic reality is significant (how does one family survive in a new country, with an ageing mother and young child depending on a single income).

But even more crucial, the customer has a prosthetic leg and Little Dog’s mother massages the space no longer occupied by the woman’s leg: pain inescapable but also invisible.

Randa Abdel-Fattah’s Discipline (2025) landed on my TBR because it landed on an episode of David Naimon’s podcast, and after that, more controversy ensued. (Which my Australian friends have summarised and linked to, here and here.)

There were people who tried to stop this book from being published. They failed,” she writes, in her Acknowledgements. There are some redacted lines there too: the situation is fraught.

Discipline is controversial in some of the same ways that the TV series Mo is controversial on-screen, simply by prioritising the inner- and outer-lives of young Palestinians and Muslims.

They have families and tasks to complete each day: they are not simply the stuff of headlines and a set of tragic statistics. And because the novel is written as a series of scenes, it feels a little like you’re watching a show. But, simultaneously, there’s a sense of this being a thesis brought to life.

Abdel-Fattah writes:

“They were all constantly encountering their lives through a lenticular lens. Viewed from one angle: joy, love, laughter, tensions, privilege, routine. Viewed from the slightest tilt: tragedy, injustice, oppression.” And the author risks being seen as the representative resistor, as Hannah: “Hannah refused to acquiesce to the process. She refused, she refused, she refused.”

Christina Li’s Clues to the Universe (2021) was a whimsical borrowing from the children’s department because instead of the usual jacket copy, there’s a numbered list, and that reminded me of my beloved Anastasia Krupnik series (by Lois Lowry). The list is from the second chapter, which is in Benji’s voice; the novel begins with Ro’s— Ro, for Rosalind—voice.

Neither kid fits with their classmates, but they seem to fit together, because neither has a father: Ro’s has died and Benji’s has disappeared. Ro is all about science and rockets and space; Benji is all about drawing and superheroes and licorice. Li’s language is simple, her themes timeless, and the alternating pov invites us to lean in, where just the right-amount-of-resolution settles in a place I like: where things aren’t perfect, but they might be okay.

“You don’t think I hear what people say about me? You don’t think I know that they say I’m a homeless-looking, know-it-all freak?” Her voice rose. “What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with wanting to figure out how fast the Earth rotates around the sun or wanting to launch a rocket because I want to know things? Because I actually care?”

All year, stories like these have been in my stack. Now, in Ocean Vuong’s next novel, in Natsuo Kirino’s Swallows (Trans. Lisa Hofmann-Kuroda), Amitav Ghosh’s Ghost-Eye, and in Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitan Quartet, other characters are whispering that I hold back this post and include them too. I like to think of them all, chatting amongst themselves in the next room, after I go to sleep: finding company with one another, at last.

Have you been meeting characters like this in your reading lately?