• By Tony McCloud
  • Posted Thursday, September 4, 2025

Pick up a good book and join us with the Alliance Book Club

The Alliance Book Club is a systemwide book club dedicated to reading and discussing books by and/or about members of the LGBTQIA+ community. The book club will meet on the fourth Saturday of each month at 11 a.m. at NorthStar LGBTQ+ Community Center. All are welcome.

For more information and to join the book club, please contact Tony McCloud (mcclouad@forsyth.cc).


September

  • Meeting: Saturday, September 27 at 11 a.m.
All Friends Are Necessary Thomas Moniz


In this joyous, big-hearted novel, Tomas Moniz delivers a commanding new story about the power of friendship, community, and the families we create for ourselves.

Efren “Chino” Flores has just moved back to the Bay Area from Seattle, jumping from sublet to sublet. In Washington, he was a beloved middle school biology teacher with a loving wife, and a child on the way until a stunning loss changed his life. Now, he’s working temp jobs, terrified of commitment, and struggling to put himself back out into the world.
But there to nurture Chino is a coterie of new and old friends and lovers who form a protective web around him. Closest to him are Metal Matt, a red-haired metalhead with a soft spot for Courtney Love and a rangy dog named Sabbath, and Mike and Kay, a couple whose literary edge is matched only by the success of their secret OnlyFans account. Like a fern blooming in the wake of a forest fire, new life comes after even the most devastating upheaval.

With gorgeous, heart-rending detail and a seemingly infinite catalogue of tender, unexpected interactions, Tomas Moniz has created a striking mosaic of desire and belonging that will appeal to fans of Garth Greenwell, Jaquira Díaz, and Patricia Lockwood. An anthem to both queer and platonic love, All Friends Are Necessary evinces the wonder of friendship and the joy of giving yourself up to the essential force of community.

All Friends Are Necessary

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