The 30 Best Books You Missed in 2015

I picked up Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s book Dirty River because I was thrilled to find another author whose name was unwieldy and confoundingly long, but as soon as I saw the subtitle (A Queer Femme of Color Dreaming Her Way Home) I was hooked. In this transformative memoir, Piepzna-Samarasinha details being a queer, disabled woman of color coming of age among young queer punks in Toronto, running from the abuse of her past. This tragicomic tale is filled with what activists now call intersectionality, but in terms of literature, it’s raw and passionate and wrenching — and it belongs on shelves next to Audre Lorde’s Zami or the pioneering This Bridge Called My Back.