A Recommended Read
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NPR • OBSERVER • 10 • STYLIST • QUEERTY • LITERARY HUB • FINANCIAL TIMES •
THE GLOBE AND MAIL • BOOKSELLER • T: THE NEW YORK TIMES STYLE MAGAZINE

USA TODAY NATIONAL BESTSELLER

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY TOP 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2025

NPR BOOKS WE LOVE 2025

ELECTRIC LIT BEST NONFICTION OF 2025

TIME OUT 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2025

STORYSMITH BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2025

A FABULOUSLY RIVETING HYBRID MEMOIR
AND QUEER HISTORY LESSON
–The New York Times

GORGEOUS –i-D • EPIC –The Observer • DREAMY –Dazed
A STRONG COCKTAIL –The Washington Post
A SOPHISTICATED TURN –The Brooklyn Rail
EXHILARATING –The Globe and Mail
A MASTERCLASS –Hippocampus
RIVETING –AnOther • SEDUCTIVE –The Face
DELIGHTFUL –Wallpaper • GENRE-EXPANDING –Tank
SUBLIME –The New Yorker

STYLISH, SEXY, AND DEEPLY MOVING,
THIS BLENDS BEAUTIFUL PROSE AND
INCISIVE SOCIAL HISTORY TO STUNNING EFFECT
– Publishers Weekly*

ATHERTON LIN’S DESCRIPTIVE POWERS,
SALTY AND SULTRY,
PROVE INEXHAUSTABLE…
SOME PAGES YOU CAN SMELL,
OTHERS YOU CAN HEAR
–The New Yorker

MESSY AND SEXY, TOUCHING AND ENLIGHTENING,
DEEP HOUSE IS A NECESSARY ADDITION
TO THE QUEER LITERARY CANON.
– Crosscurrent

HUMOROUS, ELEGANT, AND INTELLIGENT…
AN INSPIRING AND DEEPLY AFFECTING READ
– Cha Journal

IT’S JUST AS SEXY, WITTY, POIGNANT AND VIVIDLY REALISED
AS ATHERTON LIN’S DEBUT, AND CEMENTS HIS STATUS
AS ONE OF THE CONTEMPORARY QUEER CANON’S BIGGEST TALENTS. 
– Time Out

AN INTELLECTUALLY AND EMOTIONALLY POWERFUL
READ TODAY, THIS BOOK WILL GROW EVEN MORE VALUABLE
IN THE FUTURE; ITS HISTORY LESSONS ARE
WRAPPED IN RELATABLE PASSIONS.
–Passport

AN ARGUMENT FOR LOVE UNBRIDLED BY RESTRAINTS…
COULD NOT COME AT A MORE URGENT TIME
– The Brooklyn Rail

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VERY HOT –Edmund White

FROM THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD-WINNING
AUTHOR COMES A RULE–BREAKING, SWEAT-SOAKED, GENRE-BUSTING STORY OF OUTLAW LOVE

It’s 1996, and Jeremy has met the boy of his dreams — a mumbling, starry-eyed Brit — just as, amid a media frenzy, US Congress prepares the Defense of Marriage Act, denying same-sex couples rights including immigration. The pair steals away to remote forests and vast deserts, London fashion shows and Berlin sex clubs, dinner parties, back alleys, East Village hotel rooms, and San Francisco dives. Finding no other way to stay together, they shack up illicitly among unlikely allies in a ‘city of refuge.’

With an inimitable blend of tenderness and wicked humor, Deep House moves through the couple’s string of rented apartments while unlocking doors to a lineage of gay men who have come before — smuggling a foreign partner through national checkpoints or going public to stand up for the right to get down in the privacy of their own homes. They include hapless criminals, sexpot bartenders, friars, pirates, government workers who subverted the system, activists who went all the way to the Supreme Court, and the celebrated artist Felix Gonzalez-Torres.

What emerges is an unexpected romantic comedy haunted by centuries of gay ghosts. Following Gay Bar — called ‘a rich tapestry’ by Vanity Fair and ‘an absolute tour de force’ by Maggie Nelson — Deep House juxtaposes whispered disclosures of undocumented domesticity with courtroom drama and political stunts to explore myriad forms of intimacy while questioning the mechanisms that legitimize love. Deep House is at once a historical kaleidoscope and the innermost tale of two boyfriends who made a home in the shadows of a turbulent civil rights battle. 

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Deep House goes from the pensoroso of the best history of marriage equality we have to the allegro of avery hot gay love story told in the funniest, most tender way.
– Edmund White

*

Deep House is that rare and beautiful book—equally illuminating and pleasurable. I loved its luminous transcription of queer life, its incisive and intimate legal history of gay marriage in the U.S., its transcendently sexy and propulsive love story, and its portrait of social change that promises not the fantasy of permanent liberty, but that more ephemeral reward: joy. It is exactly the book we need right now.
– Melissa Febos

*

I love this book’s honesty and originality; the intricacy and intimacy with which it studies the politics of love and desire; its huge brain and dirty, beautiful heart.
– Chris Power

*

Jeremy Atherton Lin artfully combines easily forgotten social history with vivid, intimate accounts of his own love life to show us how, for queer people, the often-impersonal political grandstanding around marriage equality, and liberation more generally, can intrude upon and shape the most personal corners of gay life. In writing that isboth lyrical and informative, this book also manages to bebold and sexy.
– Shon Faye

*

This important book is about two people looking for home, a shared space and a common nationality, and is a shelter for the most intimate observations of lived experience from diverse political headwinds.
– Mendez

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2025: Little, Brown (N. America) & Allen Lane – Penguin (UK)
2026: Tusitala Editions (French)