This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family-and raise the baby together? When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby-and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it-Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese-and losing her meant losing his only family. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.Īmes isn't happy either. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. Reese almost had it all: a loving relationship with Amy, an apartment in New York City, a job she didn't hate. Finalist for the Lambda Literary Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the Gotham Book Prize.Named one of the Best Books of the Year by more than twenty publications, including The New York Times Book Review, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Time, Vogue, Esquire, Vulture, and Autostraddle “Reading this novel is like holding a live wire in your hand.”- Vulture The lives of three women-transgender and cisgender-collide after an unexpected pregnancy forces them to confront their deepest desires in “one of the most celebrated novels of the year” ( Time).

The Masker by Torrey Peters