Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl.

Paul is a young man who can transform his body however he likes, girl or boy or something else entirely, and he uses that gift to move like quicksilver through the bars, zines and love affairs of a vanished queer America.

What it's about

Set in the early 1990s, Andrea Lawlor's novel follows Paul Polydoris, a bartender and college scene-maker with a secret: he can shapeshift, altering his sex and appearance at will. He drifts between cities and lovers, sometimes as Paul, sometimes as Polly, testing the boundaries of gender, attraction and self. Woven through his picaresque adventures are fairy tales and interludes that echo his transformations, building a portrait of a particular queer moment poised between the losses of the AIDS years and the possibilities ahead.

Themes

Fluidity is the book's very substance, in gender, desire and identity, celebrated with humour and appetite. Lawlor engages the theory and politics of the era while never losing the pleasures of the body and the scene, meditating on transformation as both fantasy and lived queer reality.

Why it still matters

A cult favourite and a critical success, the novel offered a playful, literary and unabashedly sexy vision of trans and genderqueer experience that felt genuinely new. Its mythic device gives fresh form to questions many readers had never seen explored so joyfully.

Who it's for

Readers who love inventive, boundary-pushing literary fiction and stories steeped in queer culture and history. Ideal for anyone drawn to books about transformation, desire and the freedom to be many selves at once.