Sex and the city

This libidinous frolic wittily explores the foibles of the pretentiously unaware.

- CHERYL PEARL SUCHER

BIG SWISS, by Jen Beagin (Faber, $36.99)

It's the end of June in New York City and rainbow Pride flags, celebrating LGBTQI month, are whipping wildly from fire-escape balconies, celebrating the metropolitan freedoms of sexual and identity fluidity. Jen Beagin's hilarious third novel, Big Swiss, embraces this flourishing queer self-determination. A sapphic romp and a satirical examination of urban expatriates living between their dreams and reality, Big Swiss presents a cast of characters who have flown the expense and crowds of Manhattan for the bucolic renaissance of Hudson, a little city set on the east bank of the Hudson River with its own scrappy history of reinvention.

Hudson is as old as the United States, a Revolutionary War hub of maritime commerce. However, in 1850, the construction of a railroad from Albany to  New York City made the harbour obsolete and the city languished, only to redefine itself as an industrial centre with bustling ironworks, brickworks, factories and massive cement plants.