Books with queer themes are the subject of each episode of "This Queer Book Saved My Life," a podcast based out of Minneapolis. In installment after installment, host J. P. Der Boghossian talks to a guest about books that saved their life.

For the two enthralling queer protagonists in author Lucy Jane Bledsoe's just-published novel, they have lived a life scarred by their time in a Christian conversion camp, each bearing the enduring weight of psychological pain and torment.

Readers can discover Dick Kallman, a gay miniscule has-been yet fascinating celebrity, in the new novel on his tumultuous life, "Up With the Sun" by Thomas Mallon, perhaps the country's foremost historical fiction writer.

While growing up, Leslie Absher didn't know or years that her father worked for the CIA. She later decided that her life as a spy daughter was also hers to reclaim. The result is an intimate portrait of personal healing.

The title of Richard Mirabella's debut novel, "Brother & Sister Enter the Forest" promises the sinister, and Mirabella makes good on the promise. The plot sits queasily somewhere between "Hansel and Gretel" and "A Long Day's Journey Into Night."

Marcellas Reynolds' ravishing book, "Supreme Models: Iconic Black Women Who Revolutionized Fashion," is a must-have for true fashion addicts. And so is the Vogue documentary series inspired by his book.

Readers know a writer has created an effective murder mystery when they are kept guessing, and then are utterly surprised by the revelation of the guilty party. Gay author De'Shawn Charles Winslow does precisely that in his second novel, "Decent People."

An important new scholarly book, "Kids On the Street: Queer Kinship & Religion In San Francisco's Tenderloin" by Joseph Plaster, has unearthed the queer history of 'outsider youth' that has long remained hidden.

Will Schwalbe's "We Should Not Be Friends" is a memoir about two people who couldn't possibly be more different yet became unexpectedly good friends.

Novelist and straight ally Rebecca Makkai has created some of the most unforgettable queer characters in contemporary fiction. She shared insights on new novel, 'I Have Some Questions For You.'

Like a swank ocean liner of a bygone era, the John Singer Sargent exhibition, "Sargent and Spain," at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco from the National Gallery in Washington, is a welcome arrival, full of his trademark bravura paintings and drawings.

Paul Fisher, professor of American studies at Wellesley College, begins his full-scale biography, "The Grand Affair: John Singer Sargent in His World," with a confession that Sargent, a great American artist (1856-1925), is also an abiding enigma.

Tom Crewe's debut novel, "The New Life" (Scribner), has been rightly praised as historical fiction at its finest. The irony, richly deserved, is that its two main protagonists, John Addington and Henry Ellis, never met in real life.

Continuing on our Winter Books picks, here comes part two, which contains even more provocative reading material than the first group. Enjoy tales of thrillingly engrossing wartime queer love, conversion camp survival, and speculative foreign lands.