I love reading, and in particular, I love reading LGBT novels. Here are some critically acclaimed, highly-awarded and just generally amazing books to add to your reading list this autumn.

1. Middlesex - Jeffery Eugenides

This Pulitzer Prize winning book seemed to fly right under my radar - I hadn't even heard about it until a few months ago. Be warned; this book is long, detailed, and goes off on tangents like Eugenides was paid by the word. But despite breaking the very first Creative Writing 101 rule, it works superbly, because the book is about the threads of life coming together - how so many factors, even from generations before we were born, can affect us.

Our main character is Calliope Stephanides; this book follows not only the slow transformation into Cal, but the genetic mistakes and coincidences that enable it. In lyrical and wandering prose, we see Cal's grandparents fall in love in Greece, his parents falling in love in Detroit, and his own journey from a different-from-the-other-girls teenager to a man.

I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974.

2. Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe - Benjamin Alire Sáenz

This is a classic in LGBT YA lit, so if you haven't read it yet, get on with it! It's won the Stonewall Book Award as well as numerous other accolades, including the Lambda Literary Award and the Michael L. Printz Award. Not only that; the audiobook, which runs at around seven hours, is read by Hamilton creator Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Aristotle "Ari" Mendoza has accepted that he'll spend his summer break bored, miserable, and friendless. But at the pool, he meets Dante, another Mexican-American who, after bonding over their Classical names, agrees to teach Ari how to swim. From there the story sprawls and spans, covering homophobia, masculinity, racism, family relations, artistic expression and intellectualism. This book is thoughtful, heart-wrenching and beautiful. But what's best is that at the end, unlike so many other LGBT stories, there's a happy ending.

The problem with my life was that it was someone else's idea.

3. Fun Home - Alison Bechdel

You may well have heard of the Bechdel Test - it's pretty famous among feminist circles. It's basically this: are there two named female characters who talk about something other than a man? If so, it passes. It's staggering to see the amount of films, TV and other media that don't.

What many don't know about the woman behind the test is what's revealed in Fun Home. This detailed, profound graphic novel tells the story of her complicated relationship with her father; non-linear and winding, it slowly unravels into a tragic, heartfelt memoir of Bechdel's growing up as a lesbian in rural Pennsylvania. Winner of the GLAAD Media Award, the Stonewall Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award, this tale tackles sexuality, family dysfunction, suicide and gender in one fell swoop.

Then there were those famous wings. Was Daedalus really stricken with grief when Icarus fell into the sea? Or just disappointed by the design failure?

4. At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill

Now for something a little more European - Irish, to be exact. Jamie O'Neill's first book, 10 years in the writing, is an astoundingly beautiful love story between two working class young men. Jim Mack, a budding scholarship intellectual and Doyler Doyle, an outspoken and rebellious drop-out, get to know each other when Doyler promises to teach Mack how to swim in the year preceding the Easter Uprising of 1916, a brave but failed revolt against British rule.

Though it took me a while to get used to the stream-of-consciousness style of writing and the Irish slang, it's so worth powering through and letting your brain adapt to the writing that's been labeled as a spiritual successor to James Joyce. Winning the Lambda Literary Award and the Ferro-Grumley Award for Gay Fiction, this is definitely not one to pass up.

We're extraordinary people. We must do extraordinary things.

5. The Danish Girl - David Ebershoff

Okay - I know. You know The Danish Girl (2015). Everyone was bombarded with The Danish Girl. But have you ever read the award-winning book?

I must confess, I read this before I watched the film because of an objection over the casting (if you're up to date on trans issues, you know what my objection was). But the book, completely aside from the film, is an interesting, intelligent and well-researched, if heavily fictionalised, biography of the first transgender woman, Lili Elbe, and her relationship with her wife Greta as Lili figures out who she is and who she wants to be. It asks unflinching questions about marriage, love, sex, and the reality of when everything changes dramatically - especially when it changes ways you don't always understand.