Transfemme Fiction Book Club: Small Beauty

Transfemme Fiction Book Club!

We're thrilled to welcome a brand new book club to the Lighthouse hosted by the lovely Heather! The Transfemme Fiction Book Club is a community space for discussing and discovering fiction and other creative work that centres trans women, meeting every other month.

Our October discussion will focus on the novel Small Beauty by Jia Qing Wilson-Yang.

This event will be in person at the bookshop, accessibility information is available here.

Use the code TITILLATINGLY-TRANSSEXUAL for a bookclubber's 10% off - buying your book club books from Lighthouse is a hugely appreciated way to support the bookclub and the bookshop, so thank you!

Please note that this is a space for trans women/trans femmes only. You are of course the final authority on your own gender, and if you consider yourself trans femme in any capacity (or are considering converting) then please come along. If you do not then please refrain from taking a space that could have gone to a trans woman.

The book:

Small Beauty tells the story of Mei, a mixed race trans woman managing the death of her cousin, the ways she contorts to navigate racism and transphobia, and her desire for community as she takes an opportunity to leave the city and revisit a town from her family's past, where she discovers queer family history while parsing through her own anger and trauma.

Cycling through time, points of view, and rural and city life, the novel introduces us to Mei's community in fictional Dundurn and Herbertsville, loosely based on Southern Ontario places: Annette and Connie, other Asian trans women from the drop-ins; Sandy, Mei's older cousin and constant (if aggressive) support; Diane, an older lesbian with a pick-up and secret links to Mei's blood family; and Nelson, a presence lost before found, whose story is told in pictures sewn into a suitcase. Interspersed with one culminating night-time lake scene, the book carries us through these stories and towards their completion as the frustrating, necessary web that keeps Mei attached to the world.