Must read lesbian novels
Discover the must-read lesbian novels of all time! Explore our curated list of captivating love stories, powerful romances, and groundbreaking LGBTQ+ literature that celebrates queer women.
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Fingersmith
by Sarah Waters
“Oliver Twist with a twist…Waters spins an absorbing tale that withholds as much as it discloses. A pulsating story.”—The New York Times Book Review The Handmaiden, a film adaptation of Fingersmith, directed by Park Chan-wook and starring Kim Tae-Ri, is now available. Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer," who raised her with unusual tenderness, as if Sue were her own. Mrs. Sucksby’s household, with its fussy babies calmed with doses of gin, also hosts a transient family of petty thieves—fingersmiths—for whom this house in the heart of a mean London slum is home. One day, the most beloved thief of all arrives—Gentleman, an elegant con man, who carries with him an enticing proposition for Sue: If she wins a position as the maid to Maud Lilly, a naïve gentlewoman, and aids Gentleman in her seduction, then they will all share in Maud’s vast inheritance. Once the inheritance is secured, Maud will be disposed of—passed off as mad, and made to live out the rest of her days in a lunatic asylum. With dreams of paying back the kindness of her adopted family, Sue agrees to the plan. Once in, however, Sue begins to pity her helpless mark and care for Maud Lilly in unexpected ways...But no one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals.
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Tipping the Velvet
by Sarah Waters
“Erotic and absorbing…Written with startling power.”—The New York Times Book Review Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-hall stars in an all-singing and dancing double act. At the same time, behind closed doors, they admit their attraction to each other and their affair begins.
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Nightwood
by Djuna Barnes
The fiery and enigmatic masterpiece--one of the greatest novels of the Modernist era.
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Affinity
by Sarah Waters
“Gothic tale, psychological study, puzzle narrative…This is gripping, astute fiction that feeds the mind and senses.”—The Seattle Times An upper-class woman recovering from a suicide attempt, Margaret Prior has begun visiting the women’s ward of Millbank prison, Victorian London’s grimmest jail, as part of her rehabilitative charity work. Amongst Millbank’s murderers and common thieves, Margaret finds herself increasingly fascinated by on apparently innocent inmate, the enigmatic spiritualist Selina Dawes. Selina was imprisoned after a séance she was conducting went horribly awry, leaving an elderly matron dead and a young woman deeply disturbed. Although initially skeptical of Selina’s gifts, Margaret is soon drawn into a twilight world of ghosts and shadows, unruly spirits and unseemly passions, until she is at last driven to concoct a desperate plot to secure Selina’s freedom, and her own. As in her noteworthy deput, Tipping the Velvet, Sarah Waters brilliantly evokes the sights and smells of a moody and beguiling nineteenth-century London, and proves herself yet again a storyteller, in the words of the New York Times Book Review, of "startling power."
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The Night Watch
by Sarah Waters
“[A] wonderful novel…Waters is almost Dickensian in her wealth of description and depth of character.”—Chicago Tribune Moving back through the 1940s, through air raids, blacked-out streets, illicit partying, and sexual adventure, to end with its beginning in 1941, The Night Watch tells the story of four Londoners—three women and a young man with a past—whose lives, and those of their friends and lovers, connect in tragedy, stunning surprise and exquisite turns, only to change irreversibly in the shadow of a grand historical event.
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Price of Salt
by Patricia Highsmith
With an autobiographical Afterword by the author, "The Price of Salt" is now recognized as a masterwork, the scandalous novel that anticipated Nabokov's "Lolita."
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The Killing Room
by Gerri Hill
Denver detective Jake McCoy was rehabbing at her cabin in the mountains, trying to reconcile the shooting death of a young boy. Psychologist Nicole Westbrook, an expert in domestic violence, is in those very same mountains, escaping from the horrors of her profession for a brief vacation. Nicole becomes lost when she leaves the well-marked hiking trail in search of hot springs, and she stumbles upon Jake, who is enjoying her own soak in remote springs. They exchange first names only, but after a few hours together, a physical attraction neither can explain, engulfs them, leaving them as lovers, not strangers, when Nicole departs the following day. But when Jake returns to Denver, a murder investigation leads her to Nicole. Both are surprised that they are face to face with the stranger they thought they'd never see again. Nicole tries to remain in the professional closet that she's been hiding in for so long, a place where out cop Jake McCoy does not fit. And Jake, still trying to recover from the shooting that left her injured, does her best to distance herself from Nicole. It is soon evident that a serial killer is targeting Nicole's former patients. Try as they may, they cannot deny the physical attraction between them, even if it means compromising the investigation. But after all is said and done, the fact remains that Nicole and Jake live in two different worlds. Despite the physical attraction and the gentle tug of love, both women accept that when their case is over, they will go their separate ways. Jake retreats back to the mountains, and Nicole resumes her practice in earnest, both trying to forget the other, and both failing.
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Starting from Scratch
by Georgia Beers
"What happens when your life takes an unexpected turn? What happens when you need to protect the one you love from the one you want to love? What happens when you lose something you never knew you wanted?"--Publisher description.
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Photographs of Claudia
by K. G. MacGregor
Art transforms passion into love in this novel by bestselling Lambda Literaryand Golden Crown award-winning author McGregor.
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Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe
by Fannie Flagg
Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a now-classic novel about two women: Evelyn, who’s in the sad slump of middle age, and gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode, who’s telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women—the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth—who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, offering good coffee, southern barbecue, and all kinds of love and laughter—even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present will never be quite the same again. Praise for Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe “A real novel and a good one [from] the busy brain of a born storyteller.”—The New York Times “Happily for us, Fannie Flagg has preserved [the Threadgoodes] in a richly comic, poignant narrative that records the exuberance of their lives, the sadness of their departure.”—Harper Lee “This whole literary enterprise shines with honesty, gallantry, and love of perfect details that might otherwise be forgotten.”—Los Angeles Times “Funny and macabre.”—The Washington Post “Courageous and wise.”—Houston Chronicle
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The Color Purple
by Alice Walker
Set in the period between the world wars, this novel tells of two sisters, their trials, and their survival.