The Third Monday Gay Men's Online Book Club

"In Daniel Lefferts’s searing debut novel Ways and Means, a striving finance student confronts the line between ambition and greed, and the disordered politics of his era.

Alistair McCabe comes to New York with a plan. Young, handsome, intelligent, and gay, he hopes to escape his Rust Belt poverty and give his mother a better life by pursuing a career in high finance. But by the spring of 2016, Alistair’s plan has come undone: His fantasy banking job has eluded him and he’s mired in student debt. In his desperation, he’s gone to work for an enigmatic billionaire whose ambitions turn out to be far darker than any Alistair could have imagined. By the time Alistair uncovers his employer’s secret, his life is in danger and now he’s on the run.

Meanwhile, Alistair’s paramours, an older couple named Mark and Elijah, must face their own moral and financial dilemmas. Mark, nearing the end of his trust fund, takes a job with his father’s mobile-home empire, which forces him to confront the unsavory foundations of his family’s wealth, while Elijah, a failed painter, hitches his wagon to an artist-provocateur engaged on a project that makes the country’s political chaos into a thing of alluring, amoral beauty. As the nation hurtles toward a breaking point, Alistair, Mark, and Elijah must band together to save one another and themselves.

"In this contemporary debut novel — an intimate portrait of queer, racial, and class identity — Andrés, a gay Latinx professor, returns to his suburban hometown in the wake of his husband’s infidelity. There he finds himself with no excuse not to attend his twenty-year high school reunion, and hesitantly begins to reconnect with people he used to call friends.

Over the next few weeks, while caring for his aging parents and navigating the neighborhood where he grew up, Andrés falls into old habits with friends he thought he’d left behind. Before long, he unexpectedly becomes entangled with his first love and is forced to tend to past wounds.

"Set in Renaissance-era Florence, this ravishing debut reimagines the intersecting lives of three ambitious young men—a banker, a priest, and a gay painter named Leonardo.

Leonardo da Vinci, twelve years old and a bastard, leaves the Tuscan countryside to join his father in Florence with dreams of becoming a painter. Francesco Salviati, also a bastard and scorned for his too-dark skin, dedicates himself to the Catholic Church with grand hopes of salvation. Towering above them both is Lorenzo de’ Medici, barely a man, yet soon to be the patriarch of the world’s wealthiest and most influential bank. Each is, in his own way, a son of Florence. Each will, when their paths cross, shed blood on Florence’s streets.