From Havana to Dublin: lesbian fiction that tears it up
Explore top lesbian fiction from Havana to Dublin with these tear-jerking reads. Discover passionate stories, intense emotions, and unforgettable characters in this curated list of Dublin and Havana-set novels.
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Abeng
by Michelle Cliff
A lyrical coming-of-age story and a provocative retelling of the colonial history of Jamaica Originally published in 1984, this critically acclaimed novel is the story of Clare Savage, a light-skinned, twelve-year-old, middle-class girl growing up in Jamaica in the 1950s. As she tries to find her own identity and place in her culture, Clare carries the burden of her mixed heritage. There are the Maroons, who used the conch shellathe "abeng"ato pass messages as they fought against their English enslavers. And there is her white great-great-grandfather, Judge Savage, who burned his hundred slaves on the eve of their emancipation. In Clareas struggle to reconcile the conflicting legacies of her own personal lineage, esteemed Caribbean author Michelle Cliff dramatically confronts the cultural and psychological violence inflicted upon the island and its people by colonialism.
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Memory Mambo
by Achy Obejas
A twenty-four-year-old Cuban lesbian seeks a place for herself in her adopted American home while learning to cope with her dysfunctional family and overwhelming memories of her life in Cuba.
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Shy Girl
by Elizabeth Stark
San Francisco's edgy lesbian culture is the backdrop for this exploration of identity and secret lives. Alta Corral is a butch girl who is hung up on her first love, a girl nicknamed Shy. In her early twenties, Alta is still searching for Shy, whose reluctant visit home to her dying mother uncovers a hidden, harrowing past. Shy Girl explores the dark territory of silence.
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Hood
by Emma Donoghue
A romance between two lesbians in Ireland, from its beginning in school to its dissolution in death. Repeatedly they break up, come together, break up again, then one has an accident. The survivor describes their relationship against the background of a very straight society. By the author of Stir-fry.
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Zami: A New Spelling of My Name
by Audre Lorde
Zami: A Carriacou name for women who work together as friends and lovers “Zami is a fast-moving chronicle. From the author’s vivid childhood memories in Harlem to her coming of age in the late 1950s, the nature of Audre Lorde’s work is cyclical. It especially relates the linkage of women who have shaped her . . . Lorde brings into play her craft of lush description and characterization. It keeps unfolding page after page.”—Off Our Backs “Among the elements that make the book so good are its personal honesty and lack of pretentiousness, characteristics that shine through the writing bespeaking the evolution of a strong and remarkable character.”—The New York Times
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Does Your Mama Know?
by Lisa C. Moore
A collection of 49 stories, poems, essays and interviews about coming out as a black lesbian.
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Working Parts
by Lucy Jane Bledsoe
A novel on illiteracy set in San Francisco. The protagonist is Lori a 28-year-old lesbian who repairs bikes. A male co-worker acquires some money for being disfigured in a car accident and proposes a partnership with a shop of their own if she learns to read, and so she goes back to school.
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Written on the Body
by Jeanette Winterson
The most beguilingly seductive novel to date from the author of The Passion and Sexing the Cherry. Winterson chronicles the consuming affair between the narrator, who is given neither name nor gender, and the beloved, a complex and confused married woman. “At once a love story and a philosophical meditation.” —New York Times Book Review.
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Love, Death, and the Changing of the Seasons
by Marilyn Hacker
This critically acclaimed sonnet sequence is the passionately intense story of a love affair between two women, from the electricity of their first acquaintance to the experience of their parting.
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White Teeth
by Zadie Smith
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The blockbuster debut novel from "a preternaturally gifted" writer (The New York Times) and author of On Beauty and Swing Time—set against London's racial and cultural tapestry, reveling in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own. At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. “[White Teeth] is, like the London it portrays, a restless hybrid of voices, tones, and textures…with a raucous energy and confidence.” —The New York Times Book Review
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Cereus Blooms at Night
by Shani Mootoo
Set on a fictional Caribbean island in the town of Paradise, Cereus Blooms at Night unveils the mystery surrounding Mala Ramchandin and the tempestuous history of her family. At the heart of this bold and seductive novel is an alleged crime committed many years before the story opens. Mala is the reclusive old woman suspected of murder who is delivered to the Paradise Alms House after a judge finds her unfit to stand trial. When she arrives at her new home, frail and mute, she is placed in the tender care of Tyler, a vivacious male nurse, who becomes her unlikely confidante and the storyteller of Mala's extraordinary life.In luminous, sensual prose, internationally acclaimed writer Shani Mootoo combines diverse storytelling traditions to explore identity, gender, and violence in a celebration of our capacity to love.