The Small Queer Press Book Club is a continuous 2026 book club at The Pond aiming to uplift queer published works from smaller -mostly indie and micro- presses focusing on diverse stories of LGBTQIA+ life and people.
The book club will run in 2-3 month cycles, each cycle focusing on a different press.
In August to October we are exploring the works from Dead Ink. For August we are reading “Above Us the Sea” by Ania Card:
'Maybe when we looked away from it, it could only be for a fragmented moment. Maybe our gaze always returned, our eyes always finding the sea.' It's after a night in Cardiff's loudest gay bar that Toni first lays eyes on Gav, a retired Welsh boxer, and his boyfriend Karol, an aspiring Polish photographer. The trio soon falls into an intimate, ambiguous love triangle. After a tragic event at a beach in Swansea, the trio is ripped apart, and Toni escapes to London, becoming caught between a convenient, loveless relationship and an illicit, lustful affair. Lost halfway between the British future she has always wanted, and the Eastern European past she has been running from, Toni can only wonder where and with whom she really belongs. Above Us the Sea is an ode to the tangled remains of lost loves and the imprints left by grieving souls, yearning for connection. This is a story of aching and emerging, intimacy and distance, set against an increasingly hostile landscape.
Dead Ink is a publisher based in the North of England. They are unsatisfied with the mainstream, and their aim is to do whatever they want and do it well. Over the years they have revived cult texts and launched wildly inventive, experimental projects that everybody said would never work. They invite you to step out of the mainstream and into something more interesting.
Read more about them here: https://deadinkbooks.com/
*no reader commitment!*
- read the book, or start reading it
- show up to the discussion
- no sign ups needed
- you can go to one, or some, or all
- book club is held monthly
- 2-3 month cycles highlighting a different queer press
- the books are available at The Pond
- the books are in english, mostly fiction
There are copies of the book available at The Pond for a 10% discount!
If you want to join the bookclub remotely, or track your reading for these books, you can joining the Storygraph challenge for funsies.