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Best Sapphic Books to Fall in Love With!
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items Looking for your next sapphic read? Discover these unforgettable stories that beautifully celebrate love, identity, and the power of authentic storytelling! Here are my top faves.
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield is a captivating, haunting tale of love, loss, and the secrets that lie beneath the surface. When marine biologist Leah’s submarine sinks during a routine expedition, she is stranded at the sea floor for mont...
Our Wives Under the Sea
In a dying world, an agent of the Commandment finds a letter with a chilling instruction: "Burn before reading." What starts as a message between two rival agents, each determined to secure victory for their sides, quickly turns into something unexpe...
This Is How You Lose the Time War
Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman falls in love with Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname "Boulder." When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik, the couple decides to move there together, but Samsa has a deep desire to have a child. At forty...
Boulder: 2023 International Booker Nominee
Ren Yu is a swimmer, her life revolving around the pool. Every day, she trains with her teammates and follows her coach’s guidance, hoping to swim well enough to earn a scholarship, make her parents proud, and secure a bright future. But for Ren, the...
Chlorine: A Novel
Marion Shaw has grown up in the slums, where hunger and hardship are a constant part of life. She dreams of escaping the city’s misery but sees little chance until she comes across an unusual newspaper ad seeking a bloodmaid. Intrigued by the opportu...
House of Hunger
*In the Dream House* by Carmen Maria Machado is a gripping and inventive memoir that delves into the complexities of a toxic relationship and the psychological abuse that often goes unnoticed. Through the lens of a relationship with a charismatic but...
In the Dream House: A Memoir
Moby Dyke by Krista Burton is an insightful, humorous, and deeply personal exploration of the decline of lesbian bars in America and the changing landscape of queer spaces. Once cherished sanctuaries for marginalized communities, lesbian bars numbere...
Moby Dyke: Quest for Last Lesbian Bars
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name by Audre Lorde is a powerful, lyrical memoir that explores the intersection of race, sexuality, and identity. The book blends autobiography with myth, telling the story of Lorde’s coming-of-age as a Black lesbian in mi...
Zami: A New Spelling of My Name - Biomythography
In her groundbreaking book, Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Lillian Faderman reclaims the history of lesbian life in twentieth-century America, offering a rich and nuanced exploration of lesbian identity and subcultures. Faderman argues that while the...
Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers: Lesbian Life
*On Freedom* by Maggie Nelson is an exploration of the complexities surrounding the concept of freedom, examining how it impacts our lives, our society, and our world today. Nelson grapples with the ways freedom is both celebrated and critiqued, aski...
On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint
Personal Attention Roleplay by Helen Chau Bradley is a sharp, wryly funny debut collection of stories that delve into the complexities of queer identity, mixed-race experiences, and the struggles of navigating intimacy in a late capitalist world. Set...
Personal Attention Roleplay: Eng, Fr, Sp
*After Sappho* by Selby Wynn Schwartz is a daring and poetic debut novel that reimagines the lives of women across centuries who dared to break free from societal constraints and forge their own paths. Inspired by the muse that ignited the Greek poet...
After Sappho: A Novel
Jenny Hval’s debut novel, *Paradise Rot*, is a surreal and intensely sensory exploration of sexual awakening and queer desire. Jo, a university student in a strange new country, moves into a house with no walls, shared with a woman whose lack of boun...
Paradise Rot: A Novel (Verso Fiction)
In Voice Like a Hyacinth, five art students, Jo, Caroline, Finch, Amrita, and Saz, share an unbreakable bond and a relentless drive for creativity. Desperate to revive their inspiration, they turn to the occult, cursing their sinister professor in a ...
Voice Like a Hyacinth: A Novel
In A Dark and Drowning Tide, Lorelei Kaskel, a quick-witted folklorist, joins an expedition with six eccentric nobles to find a fabled magical spring that promises unimaginable power. The king hopes to use its magic to solidify his reign over the war...
A Dark and Drowning Tide: A Novel
In *The Bloodless Princes*, Saralene, the newly-promoted High Mage, and Sir Maddileh, her steadfast companion, begin their journey to change their world for the better after their fateful quest to slay the White Lady and recover the Fireborne Blade. ...
The Bloodless Princes: The Fireborne Blade, Book 2
Can't Spell Treason Without Tea is the first book in the Tomes & Tea series, blending cozy charm with political intrigue and a dash of magic. Reyna, a royal guard, and Kianthe, an incredibly powerful mage, dream of leaving their dangerous lives b...
Can't Spell Treason Without Tea (Tomes & Tea, 1)
After running away from home, Sybil Clarion is eager to embrace all the freedom the Belle Époque city of Severon has to offer. Instead, she’s traded high-society soirées for empty pockets. At least she has Esme, the girl who offered Sybil a home, and...
The Absinthe Underground
Rachel is a twenty-four-year-old woman struggling with an obsessive relationship to food and control. A lapsed Jew, she has made calorie restriction her religion, meticulously navigating her life through rituals and routines. By day, she works as an ...
Milk Fed: A Novel
Dykette follows the lives of Sasha and Jesse, two creative, sexually adventurous, and tumultuous twentysomethings living in Brooklyn. When an invitation from an older, wealthier lesbian couple, Jules Todd, a prominent news host, and her psychotherapi...
Dykette: A Novel
Gilda is a twenty-something atheist lesbian grappling with existential dread, particularly her overwhelming fear of death. Alienated from her repressive family and desperate for relief, she responds to a flyer for free therapy at a local Catholic chu...
Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead
Big Swiss follows Greta, who lives with her friend Sabine in an old, unrenovated Dutch farmhouse in Hudson, New York, surrounded by bees and isolation. Greta spends her days transcribing therapy sessions for a sex coach named Om. During her work, she...
Big Swiss: A Novel
Notes of a Crocodile is a coming-of-age novel set in 1980s Taipei, during the post-martial-law era. The story follows Lazi, an anonymous lesbian narrator, as she navigates love, friendship, and artistic expression while struggling to meet the expecta...
Notes of a Crocodile (NYRB Classics)
The Well of Loneliness is a groundbreaking lesbian novel by Radclyffe Hall, published in 1928. It tells the story of Stephen Gordon, an upper-class Englishwoman who experiences "sexual inversion" (homosexuality) from a young age. As Stephen grows old...
The Well of Loneliness
Winter Love by Han Suyin is a poignant novel set in London during the harsh winter of 1944. The story follows Red, a college student, who becomes deeply infatuated with her married classmate Mara. Their passionate affair brings forth intense emotions...
Winter Love (McNally Editions)
Sophia Willoughby, a young Englishwoman from an aristocratic family and a person of strong opinions and even stronger will, has packed her cheating husband off to Paris. He can have his tawdry mistress. She intends to devote herself to the serious bu...
Summer Will Show (New York Review Books Classics)
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit by Jeanette Winterson is a semi-autobiographical coming-of-age novel that explores themes of religion, sexuality, and self-identity. The story follows Jeanette, a young girl raised in a strict evangelical Christian hous...
Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit
Fair Play by Tove Jansson is a beautifully crafted novel that follows the complex and evolving relationship between Mari, a writer, and Jonna, an artist. Living in a large apartment building with their studios connected by a long attic passageway, th...
Fair Play (New York Review Books Classics)
When I Arrived at the Castle is an erotic horror graphic novel by E.M. Carroll, blending gothic horror with themes of desire, power, and fear. The story follows an unnamed protagonist who arrives at a castle, determined to confront the sinister force...
When I Arrived at the Castle
Dykes to Watch Out For is known for its blend of humor, sharp social commentary, and deeply human exploration of sexuality and identity. Bechdel combines elements of soap operas and serialized Victorian novels with astute reflections on politics, cul...
The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For
Girl Meets Boy by Ali Smith is a modern, witty retelling of the ancient Greek myth of Iphis and Ianthe from Ovid's Metamorphoses. In this novel, Smith reimagines the myth of transformation, love, and gender as it unfolds through the lives of two Scot...
Girl Meets Boy: The Myth of Iphis (The Myths)
Sirens & Muses by Antonia Angress is a sharp and insightful exploration of art, identity, and the complexities of relationships within a contemporary elite college setting. Set in 2011 against the backdrop of America’s economic recession and the ...
Sirens & Muses: A Novel
Charismatic Marie Antoine is the daughter of the richest man in 19th century Montreal. She has everything she wants, except for a best friend—until clever, scheming Sadie Arnett moves to the neighborhood. Immediately united by their passion and inten...
When We Lost Our Heads: A Novel
Chain-Gang All-Stars by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah is a gripping and dystopian novel that delves into the brutal world of criminal justice, entertainment, and resistance. Set in a future where the criminal justice system has been turned into a televise...
Chain Gang All Stars: A Novel
Mrs. S by K Patrick is a captivating and sensual debut novel set in an elite English boarding school. The story centers around a butch Australian outsider who takes on the role of matron, an antiquated position within the prestigious institution. The...
Mrs. S
Eighteen-year-old Natalie has just arrived at her first year of university in Toronto, leaving her remote, forested hometown for the big, impersonal city. Everyone she encounters seems to know exactly who they are. She reads advice listicles and watc...
The Adult
Written on the Body by Jeanette Winterson, published on February 1, 1994, is a deeply passionate and unconventional novel about love, desire, and identity. The story follows an unnamed narrator who embarks on a passionate love affair with a woman nam...
Written on the Body
Maddileh is a knight. There aren’t many women in her line of work, and it often feels like the sneering and contempt from her peers is harder to stomach than the actual dragon slaying. But she’s a knight, and made of sterner stuff. A minor infraction...
The Fireborne Blade
There was a plan. She had the money, the connections, even the brains. It was simple: become one of the only female necromancers, earn as many degrees as possible, get a post in one of the grand cities, then prove she’s capable of greatness. The funn...
The Warden: The Warden, Book 1
What if you knew how and when you will die? Csorwe does - she will climb the mountain, enter the Shrine of the Unspoken, and gain the most honored title: sacrifice. But on the day of her foretold death, a powerful mage offers her a new fate. Leave wi...
The Unspoken Name: The Serpent Gates, Book 1
As Evelyn recounts her rise to fame and the seven marriages she had along the way, the novel delves into the complexities of love, ambition, identity, and sacrifice. Each of Evelyn's husbands represents a different chapter in her life, and through th...
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo