Best Lesbian Books

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. Alice Walker's iconic modern classic is now a Penguin Book.A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentiethcentury rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty t...

Aging and reclusive Hollywood movie icon Evelyn Hugo is finally ready to tell the truth about her glamorous and scandalous life. But when she chooses unknown magazine reporter Monique Grant for the job, no one is more astounded than Monique herself. Why her Why now Monique is not exactly on top of the world. Her husband has left her, and her prof...

“Available recommendation signals cluster around Fiction, LGBTQ lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for imaginative storytelling, atmosphere, or character-driven reflection. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

“Available recommendation signals cluster around Romance, LGBTQRomance, Fiction, Teen, Young lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for imaginative storytelling, atmosphere, or character-driven reflection. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

Nevada is the darkly comedic story of Maria Griffiths, a young trans woman living in New York City and trying to stay true to her punk values while working retail. When she finds out her girlfriend has lied to her, the world she thought she'd carefully built for herself begins to unravel, and Maria sets out on a journey that will most certainly cha...

On the "books read" section of Emma Watson's GoodReads profile.

In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, Fantasy, and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bend...

“Available recommendation signals cluster around ComicsFiction, Fiction, Comics., Comics.Fiction lists, suggesting this book may fit readers looking for imaginative storytelling, atmosphere, or character-driven reflection. Treat this as discovery context, not a quality guarantee.”

For fans of Bloom and Spinning, criticallyacclaimed writer Gabby Rivera (Marvel's America) adapts her bestselling novel alongside artist Celia Moscote in an unforgettable queer comingofage story exploring race, identity and what it means to be true to your amazing self. Even when the rest of the world doesn't understand. Juliet Milagros Palante ...

Every sorority has its secrets...And college freshman Ginger Carmichael couldn't care less. She has more important things on her mind, like maintaining her perfect GPA. No matter how much she can't stand the idea of the cliques and the matching colors, there's something about the girls of Alpha Beta Omega?their beauty, confidence, and unapologetic ...

Nick has a threelegged dog named Lucky, some pet fish, and two moms who think he's the greatest kid ever. And he happens to think he has the greatest Moms ever, but everything changes when his birth mom and her wife, Jo, start to have marital problems. Suddenly, Nick is in the middle, and instead of having two Moms to turn to for advice, he has no...

Razia Mirza is a Pakistani woman from Corona, Queens, who grew up in a tight Muslim community surrounding the first Sunni masjid built in New York City. When a rebellious streak leads to her excommunication, she decides to hit the road. Corona moves between Razia?s childhood and the comedic misadventures she encounters on her journey, from a Purit...

Two women meet and fall in love in Reno, Nevada. This classic of lesbian eroticism is Jane Rule's first novel.Set in the late 1950s, this is the story of Evelyn Hall, an English professor, who goes to Reno to obtain a divorce and put an end to her disastrous 16year marriage. While staying at a boarding house to establish her sixweek residency req...

A love letter to the craft and romance of film and fate in front of?and behind?the camera from the awardwinning author of Hold Still. A wunderkind young set designer, Emi has already started to find her way in the competitive Hollywood film world. Emi is a film buff and a true romantic, but her reallife relationships are a mess. She has despe...

Thirteen tales are unspun from the deeply familiar, and woven anew into a collection of fairy tales that wind back through time. Acclaimed Irish author Emma Donoghue reveals heroines young and old in unexpected alliancessometimes treacherous, sometimes erotic, but always courageous. Told with luminous voices that shimmer with sensuality and truth...

Early in the 19th century, in a puritanical New England town, two women fell in love with one another. And with nothing and no one to guide or support them, Patience and Sarah tried to follow their hearts. "A remarkable story".Publishers Weekly....

A landmark comingofage novel that launched the career of one of this country?s most distinctive voices, Rubyfruit Jungle remains a transformative work more than forty years after its original publication. In bawdy, moving prose, Rita Mae Brown tells the story of Molly Bolt, the adoptive daughter of a dirtpoor Southern couple who boldly forges he...

Cas has fought pirates her entire life. But can she survive living among themFor Cassandra Leung, bossing around sea monsters is just the family business. She?s been a Reckoner trainerintraining ever since she could walk, raising the geneticallyengineered beasts to defend ships as they cross the pirateinfested NeoPacific. But when the pirate q...

With a welcome mix of humor, heart, and highstakes drama, Sabina Khan provides a timely and honest portrait of what it's like to grow up feeling unwelcome in your own culture.Seventeenyearold Rukhsana Ali has always been fascinated by the universe around her and the laws of physics that keep everything in order. But her life at home isn't so abs...

Seventeen, fashionobsessed, and gay, Abby Ives has always been content playing the sidekick in other people?s lives. While her friends and sister have plunged headfirst into the world of dating and romances, Abby?s been happy to focus on her plussize style blog and her dreams of taking the fashion industry by storm. When she lands a great interns...

What's worse than falling in love with a straight girl Falling in love with a straight girl who drinks blood. And not even in a goth way. High school senior Mindy Murphy, has been questioning her small town life forever and, more recently, her sexuality. Maybe it has something to do with her new friend, Lucia West. When they were kids they used to...

In this richly developed Fantasy,, Lei is a member of the Paper caste, the lowest and most persecuted class of people in Ikhara. She lives in a remote village with her father, where the decadeold trauma of watching her mother snatched by royal guards for an unknown fate still haunts her. Now, the guards are back and this time it's Lei they're after...

Capturing the distinct rhythms of Jamaican life and dialect, Nicole DennisBenn pens a tender hymn to a world hidden among pristine beaches and the wide expanse of turquoise seas. At an opulent resort in Montego Bay, Margot hustles to send her younger sister, Thandi, to school. Taught as a girl to trade her sexuality for survival, Margot is ruthles...

Nature is out of balance in the human world. The sun hasn't shone in years, and crops are failing. Worse yet, strange and hostile creatures have begun to appear. The people's survival hangs in the balance.To solve the crisis, the oracle stones are cast, and Kaede and Taisin, two seventeenyearold girls, are picked to go on a dangerous and unheard...

When Suzette comes home to Los Angeles from her boarding school in New England, she isn't sure if she'll ever want to go back. L.A. is where her friends and family are (along with her crush, Emil). And her stepbrother, Lionel, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, needs her emotional support.But as she settles into her old life, Suzette fin...

From the awardwinning author of Break and Teeth comes a raw and honest exploration of complicated identities in a novel about a girl living on the fringe of every fringe group in her small town.Etta is tired of dealing with all of the labels and categories that seem so important to everyone else in her small Nebraska hometown. Everywhere she turns...

Betrothed since childhood to the prince of Mynaria, Princess Dennaleia has always known what her future holds. Her marriage will seal the alliance between Mynaria and her homeland, protecting her people from other hostile lands. But Denna has a secret. She possesses an Affinity for fire?a dangerous gift for the future queen of a kingdom where magic...

In 1955, eighteenyearold Janet Jones keeps the love she shares with her best friend Marie a secret. It?s not easy being gay in Washington, DC, in the age of McCarthyism, but when she discovers a series of books about women falling in love with other women, it awakens something in Janet. As she juggles a romance she must keep hidden and a newfound...

Three friends, two love stories, one convention: this fun, feminist love letter to geek culture is all about fandom, friendship, and finding the courage to be yourself.Charlie likes to stand out. She?s a vlogger and actress promoting her first movie at SupaCon, and this is her chance to show fans she?s over her public breakup with costar Reese Rya...

Three thousand years ago, a god told a lie. Now, only a goddess can tell the truth. Persephone has everything a daughter of Zeus could wantexcept for freedom. She lives on the green earth with her mother, Demeter, growing up beneath the everwatchful eyes of the gods and goddesses on Mount Olympus. But when Persephone meets the enigmatic Hades, s...

Where does friendship stop and love beginAt just 19, Kendall Bettencourt is Hollywood?s hottest young starlet with the world at her feet ? but behind the glamour and designer dresses is a girl who longs for normal. Payton Taylor is Kendall?s best friend since childhood, and the one person who reminds her of who she really is ? her refuge from the ...

It?s not a crime to steal a heart... Sophie Roseingrave hates nothing more than a swindler. After her family lost their piano shop to a con man in London, they?re trying to start fresh in a new town. Her father is convinced Carrisford is an upright and honest place, but Sophie is not so sure. She has grave suspicions about silkweaver Madeline Crew...

A lyrical comingofage story from a threetime Newbery Honor winning authorThirteenyearold Staggerlee used to be called Evangeline, but she took on a fiercer name. She's always been differentset apart by the tragic deaths of her grandparents in an anticivil rights bombing, by her parents' interracial marriage, and by her family's retreat from...

Stephen Gordon (named by a father desperate for a son) is not like other girls: she hunts, she fences, she reads books, wears trousers, and longs to cut her hair. As she grows up amidst the stifling grandeur of Morton Hall, the locals begin to draw away from her, aware of some indefinable thing that sets her apart. And when Stephen Gordon reaches m...

What do you do when the source of all your problems is the one thing you don?t know how to fix With Don?t Ask, Don?t Tell nothing more than an unpleasant memory, US Army surgeon Sabine Fleischer is ready to move on with her life?if she can just figure out how to move past her PTSD. Fresh from her first deployment since surviving a vehicle attack i...

"Luke" Hamilton has always been sure that she'd never marry. She accepted that she would spend her life alone when she chose to live her life disguised as a man. After working in a brothel for three years, Nora Macauley has lost all illusions about love. She no longer hopes for a man who will sweep her off her feet and take her away to begin a new,...

Half a million dollars will be Celeste Thorne?s reward for spending four years of her life in total isolation. No faces. No voices. No way to leave. Since Celeste has never really worried about being alone, the generous paycheck she?ll receive for her participation in the solitary psychological experiment seems like easy money. When she finds an in...

From Stonewall and Lambda Awardwinning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and selfdiscovery while falling in love for the first time.Felix Love has never been in love?and, yes, he?s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it?s like and why it seems so easy fo...

Woman or man This internationally acclaimed novel looks at the world through the eyes of Jess Goldberg, a masculine girl growing up in the "Ozzie and Harriet" McCarthy era and coming out as a young butch lesbian in the preStonewall gay drag bars of a bluecollar town. Stone Butch Blues traces a propulsive journey, powerfully evoking history and p...

From the author of Fun Home the lives, loves, and politics of cult fav characters Mo, Lois, Sydney, Sparrow, Ginger, Stuart, Clarice, and othersFor twentyfive years Bechdel?s pathbreaking Dykes to Watch Out For strip has been collected in awardwinning volumes (with a quarter of a million copies in print), syndicated in fifty alternative newsp...

Top neurosurgeon Samantha Thomson needs to get married fast and is tightlipped as to why. And with over $200,000 on offer to tie the knot, no questions asked, cashstrapped ER nurse Hayden Pérez isn?t about to demand answers. The deal is only for a year of marriage, but Hayden?s going into it knowing it will be a nightmare. Sam is complicated, rude...

Six months after Hurricane Katrina has devastated New Orleans, Detective Sept Savoie is battling the nightmare of everything the storm has taken from her when a brutalised body turns up behind one of the restaurants, run by Keegan Blanchard. Soon the clues are pointing to Keegan, making the relationship growing between them very awkward....

Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is a nowclassic novel about two women: Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age, and grayheaded Mrs. Threadgoode, who is telling her life story. Her tale includes two more women, the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth who back in...

Hannah wants to spend her senior year of high school going to football games and Mardi Gras parties with her tightknit group of friends. The last thing she wants is to fall in love with a girlespecially when that girl is her best friend, Baker. Hannah knows she should like Wally, the kind, earnest boy who asks her to prom. She should cheer on he...

Ivan E. Coyote is a master storyteller and performer; their beautiful, funny stories about growing up a lesbian butch in the Canadian north have attracted big audiences whether gay, straight, or otherwise. Missed Her is Ivan's fifth story collection, following 2008's Lambdanominated The Slow Fix and Bow Grip, their novel that was named a Stonewall...

Pop star Leontyne Blake might sing about love, but she stopped believing in it a long time ago. What women want is her image, not the real her. When her father has a stroke, she flees the spotlight and returns to her tiny Missouri hometown.In her childhood home, she meets smalltown nurse Holly Drummond, who isn?t impressed by Leo?s fame at all. Th...

Just because you?re through with your past, doesn?t mean it?s through with you.Margaret Beringer didn?t have an easy adolescence. She hated her name, was less than popular in school, and was always cast aside as a ?farm kid.? However, with the arrival of Courtney Carrington, Margaret?s youth sparked into color. Courtney was smart, beautiful, and pu...

Actress Caidence Harris is living her dreams after landing a leading role among the starstudded, veteran cast of 9th Precinct, a hot new police drama shot on location in glitzy LA. Her sometimescostar Robyn Ward is magnetic, glamorous, and devastatingly beautiful, the quintessential AList celebrity on the fasttrack to superstardom. When the tw...

Impossible love between two girls ?one human, one Made. A love that could birth a revolution.After the War of Kinds ravaged the kingdom of Rabu, the Automae, Designed to be the playthings of royals, took over the estates of their owners and bent the human race to their will.Now, Ayla, a human servant rising the ranks at the House of the Sovereign, ...

In her debut story collection, Kristen Arnett, with dark humor, explores the lives of queer women and their families in the light of the bleak Florida sun. A young dancer suddenly loses language while her family struggles to understand their new roles. A mother endures a horrifying spider bite while camping with her daughters in the backyard. A fam...

Spirited Christian Tala and shy Muslim Leyla could not be more different from each other, but the attraction is immediate and goes deeper than friendship. Moving between Middle Eastern high society and London?s West End, this story explores the clashes between East and West, love and marriage, and convention and individuality creating a humorous an...

Small Beauty tells the story of Mei, who in coping with the death of her cousin abandons her life in the city to live in his now empty house in a small town. There she connects with his history as well as her own, learns about her aunt?s longterm secret relationship, and reflects on the trans women she left behind. She also brushes up against some...

Author of Empire of Sand and Realm of Ash Tasha Suri's The Jasmine Throne, beginning a new trilogy set in a world inspired by the history and epics of India, in which a captive princess and a maidservant in possession of forbidden magic become unlikely allies on a dark journey to save their empire from the princess's traitor brother.Imprisoned by h...

If you don?t get lost, there?s a chance you may never be found. Jenna McGovern has spent her whole life training for the stage. She?s taken dance classes, voice lessons, and even earned her performance degree from one of the most prestigious musical theater programs in the nation. At graduation, she?s stunned when a chance audition lands her a prim...

Seventeen is nothing like Codi Teller imagined.She?s never crashed a party, never stayed out too late. She?s never even been kissed. And it?s not just because she?s gay. It?s because she and her two best friends, Maritza and JaKory, spend more time in her basement watching Netflix than engaging with the outside world.So when Maritza and JaKory sugg...

The heartrending autobiographical manga that?s taken the internet by storm!My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is an honest and heartfelt look at one young woman?s exploration of her sexuality, mental wellbeing, and growing up in our modern age. Told using expressive artwork that invokes both laughter and tears, this moving and highly entertain...

The graphic novel debut from rising star Noelle Stevenson, based on her beloved and critically acclaimed web comic, which Slate awarded its Cartoonist Studio Prize, calling it "a deadpan epic."Nemeses! Dragons! Science! Symbolism! All these and more await in this brilliantly subversive, sharply irreverent epic from Noelle Stevenson. Featuring an ex...

THE NATIONAL BESTSELLER "Transformative ... If Tobia aspires to the ranks of comic memoirists like David Sedaris and Mindy Kaling, Sissy succeeds." The New York Times Book ReviewA heartwrenching, eyeopening, and giggleinducing memoir about what it's like to grow up not sure if you're (a) a boy, (b) a girl, (c) something in between, or (d) all ...

Jeanette Winterson?s novels have established her as one of the most important young writers in world literature. The Passion is perhaps her most highly acclaimed work, a modern classic that confirms her special claim on the novel. Set during the tumultuous years of the Napoleonic Wars, The Passion intertwines the destinies of two remarkable people:...

Trash, Allison's landmark collection, laid the groundwork for her critically acclaimed Bastard Out of Carolina, the National Book Award finalist that was hailed by The New York Times Book Review as "simply stunning...a wonderful work of fiction by a major talent." In addition to Allison's classic stories, this new edition of Trash features "Stubbor...

Written on the Body is a secret code only visible in certain lights: the accumulation of a lifetime gather there. In places the palimpsest is so heavily worked that the letters feel like braille. I like to keep my body rolled away from prying eyes, never unfold too much, tell the whole story. I didn't know that Louise would have reading hands. She ...

Take a journey through time and genres and discover a past where queer figures live, love and shape the world around them. Seventeen of the best young Adult, authors across the queer spectrum have come together to create a collection of beautifully written diverse historical fiction for teens. From a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood set in warto...

Life is going damned well for Blair Spencer. She's a very successful real estate agent, happily married to a man who encourages her to live the independent life she loves; and they're actively working to have a baby.The wrench in the works is that Blair favors adoption, while her husband David desperately wants to have a biological child. The fates...

Each of these stories is original, each is by a noted author for young Adult,s, and each honestly portrays its subject and themegrowing up gay or lesbian, or with gay or lesbian parents or friends. Includes:"Michael's Little Sister" / C. S. Adler"Dancing Backwards" / Marion Dane Bauer"Winnie and Tommy" / Francesca Lia Block"Am I Blue" / Bruce Covi...

"If you don't put that ring on this minute, I'm going to take it back," Annie whispered in my ear. She leaned back, looking at me, her hands still on my shoulders, her eyes shining softly at me and snow falling, melting, on her nose. "Buon Natale," she whispered, "amore mio.""Merry Christmas, my love," I answered.From the moment Liza Winthrop meets...

No one and nothing is as it seems in this Dickensian novel of thrills and reversals. Sue Trinder is an orphan, left as an infant in the care of Mrs. Sucksby, a "baby farmer." Mrs. Sucksby?s household 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 t...

Unknown to regular citizens, nightmarish creatures lurk in the dark underbelly of human civilization. The presence of these supranormals ("supras")?werewolves, vampires, demons?is a closely guarded government secret, as is the existence of a cadre of specially engineered Hunters charged with exterminating them. Codenamed Malice, Hunter Mary Alice ...

Emma Donoghue examines how desire between women in English literature has been portrayed, from schoolgirls and vampires to runaway wives, from crossdressing knights to contemporary murder stories. She looks at the work of those writers who have addressed the "unspeakable subject," examining whether samesex desire is freakish or omnipresent, holy ...

With a steady boyfriend, the position of Student Council President, and a chance to go to an Ivy League college, high school life is just fine for Holland Jaeger.At least, it seems to be. But when Cece Goddard comes to school, everything changes. Cece and Holland have undeniable feelings for each other, but how will others react to their developing...

When it was first published in 1988, Patrick Califia's Macho Sluts, a collection of S/M stories set in San Francisco's dyke bathhouses, sex parties, and S/M gay bars, shocked the lesbian community and caused an upheaval in the field of queer publishing. Nobody had ever written so frankly about the kinky potential of womantowoman sex (and nobody h...

A princess isn?t supposed to fall for an evil sorceress. But in this darkly magical retelling of ?Sleeping Beauty,? true love is more than a simple fairy tale. Once upon a time, there was a wicked fairy who, in an act of vengeance, cursed a line of princesses to die. A curse that could only be broken by true love?s kiss. You?ve heard this before, h...

Maurice is heartbroken over unrequited love, which opened his heart and mind to his own sexual identity. In order to be true to himself, he goes against the grain of society?s often unspoken rules of class, wealth, and politics.Forster understood that his homage to samesex love, if published when he completed it in 1914, would probably end his car...

"HOT" Maggie Nelson"TIGHT" Eileen Myles"DEEP" Michelle TeaIt's 1993 and Paul Polydoris tends bar at the only gay club in a university town thrumming with politics and partying. He studies queer theory, has a dyke best friend, makes zines, and is a flaneur with a rich dating life. But Paul's also got a secret: he's a shapeshifter. Oscillating ...

Prince Julian Stoneshire, heir to the throne of a powerful kingdom, has spent his entire life taking all that he has and all those around him for granted. His disagreeable behavior attracts the attention of a powerful sorceress, and, as women have borne the brunt of his illtreatment, she decides to teach him a lesson by making him take a walk in t...

Nobody leaves Queen. On the tidally locked, womenonly planet, a vulva and an authority problem are the only immigration requirements. Emigration is banned.Ember spends her days cruising Queen?s endless sand dunes, hunting sand pirates and wallowing in memories of her dead wife. After an ambush, Ember is dragged to the pirate camp and learns her wi...

Activistacademic MegJohn Barker and cartoonist Julia Scheele illuminate the histories of queer thought and LGBTQ action in this groundbreaking nonfiction graphic novel.From identity politics and gender roles to privilege and exclusion, Queer explores how we came to view sex, gender and sexuality in the ways that we do; how these ideas get tangl...

Saoirse doesn?t believe in love at first sight or happy endings. If they were real, her mother would still be able to remember her name and not in a care home with early onset dementia. A condition that Saoirse may one day turn out to have inherited. So she?s not looking for a relationship. She doesn?t see the point in igniting any romantic sparks ...

Before Buffy, before Twilight, before Octavia Butler's Fledgling, there was The Gilda Stories, Jewelle Gomez's sexy vampire novel."The Gilda Stories is groundbreaking not just for the wild lives it portrays, but for how it portrays themcommunally, unapologetically, roaming fiercely over space and time."Emma Donoghue, author of Room"Jewelle Gome...

Medic Ryon Drake has never been good at following protocol, so she doesn't think twice about rendering emergency care when a young girl's life is at stakeeven if the girl is in the throes of Werefever and any sane mortali should know better. It isn't the bright shining pain of the bite or even the wrenching agonies of the fever that convinces her...

When Cameron Post's parents die suddenly in a car crash, her shocking first thought is relief. Relief they'll never know that, hours earlier, she had been kissing a girl.But that relief doesn't last, and Cam is soon forced to move in with her conservative aunt Ruth and her wellintentioned but hopelessly oldfashioned grandmother. She knows that fr...

An unlikely encounter between Therese, a young sales clerk, and Carol, a lonely homemaker, leads to an amorous romance in this classic work of lesbian fiction. Struggling against the oppressive routines of their daily lives and the strict social norms governing midcentury femininity, the new lovers take to the open road where their new relationshi...

This Is Not For You, perhaps Jane Rule's most selfconsciously literary and philosophical novel, tells the story of a young woman in the late 1950s and early 1960s as she negotiates her lesbian sexuality. The Insomniac Library is proud to reissue Jane Rule's second novel more than thirty years after its original appearance in 1970, and more than fi...

This delicious, steamy debut novel chronicles the adventures of Nan King, who begins life as an oyster girl in the provincial seaside town of Whitstable and whose fortunes are forever changed when she falls in love with a crossdressing musichall singer named Miss Kitty Butler. When Kitty is called up to London for an engagement on "Grease Paint A...

Ijeoma comes of age as her nation does. Born before independence, she is eleven when civil war breaks out in the young republic of Nigeria. Sent away to safety, she meets another displaced child and they, starcrossed, fall in love. They are from different ethnic communities. They are also both girls. But when their love is discovered, Ijeoma learn...

When she was a child, the author of When Women Were Warriors happily identified with all the male heroes she read about in stories that began, "Once upon a time, a young man went out to seek his fortune." But she would have been delighted to discover even one story like that with a female protagonist. Since she never did find the story she was look...