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What Attracts Women To Other Women Exposed Is Insider Secrets

20 Must-Read Contemporary Sapphic Novels

Laura Sackton

Laura Sackton is a gay reserve guy and independent author known on the internet for adored winter, despised summer, and went over with ostentatious baking projects. She also contributes to Book Riot by writing fortnightly newsletters for Books & Bakes, which celebrate homosexual literature and delectable regards. She also reviews for chickslovechicks BookPage and AudioFile. You may capture her on Instagram shouting about the homosexual novels she loves and sharing pictures of the excursions she takes in the highlands of American Mass ( while listening to ebooks, of sure).

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Danika just wrote a fantastic article about sapphic Yah and its several manifestations. She mentioned that one of the motives she enjoys reading sapphic Yah is because there are a lot less sapphic writings to choose from in grown-up burned. As someone who reads more mature light than YA lit, and whose perusing existence revolves around homosexual publications, I’m just here to let you know that there are a lot of extraordinary sapphic novels available for adults. Appearance, I won’t go against the amazing Danika, who runs the likewise beautiful Lesbrary, and whose sapphic publication information is unquestionably superior to mine.

I’m not saying that adult sapphic lit is as plentiful as I’d like it to be. It certainly isn’t. However, over the past few years, I have read a ton of fantastic sapphic novels. I didn’t even wade into the waters of the speculative. ) Additionally, I omitted a few historical favorites from my list of recommendations because I wanted to concentrate on contemporary books: Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis, The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue, and Stray City by Chelsey Johnson. In fact, there are so many that I couldn’t put them all on this list of 20. I’m staring at my bookshelf right now, and several sapphic books are staring back at me, wondering why they didn’t make the cut: Justine by Forsyth Harmon, Fiebre Tropical by Juliana Delgado Lopera, and Amora by Natalia Borges Polesso. ( Answer: I haven’t read them yet! )

I’m also looking forward to reading all the upcoming sapphic books! Everyone in This Room Will Someday Be Dead by Emily R. Austin ( 7/6 ), Skye Falling by Mia McKenzie ( 7/27 ), and Radiant Fugitives by Nawaaz Ahmed ( 8/3 ) to name just a few.

I tried to include as many different types of sapphic experiences and lives as possible when compiling this list. These women ( hi, hello, it’s me, I see you ) feature lesbians, bi+women, and queer women who don’t identify as bi or lesbians. They’re written by and feature cis and trans women. Some have happy endings, while others don’t. Both queer and human suffering are present. Some are about bi+ women in relationships with men. Some are about happy relationships, while others are about toxic ones. Some types of romance are present, but none. They’re about parenting, friendship, grief, work, family, art, illness, and navigating identity. There are heartwarming stories, heartache, and most importantly, a lot of beautiful, messy life. They occur in urban, rural, and small towns.

Obviously no list of sapphic literature, even this relatively specific list of contemporary adult sapphic novels, will ever be comprehensive or representative of the myriad varied realities of queer women. It serves as a place to start. However, this list includes some of my absolute favorite books, regardless of genre, published recently. There’s no such thing as too much sapphic literature. We still have a long way to go unless the voices of transgender, disabled, and BIPOC women are as prevalent as those of white cis queer women.

Patsy is a work of Nicole Dennis-Benn.

Patsy is a gay woman who leaves Jamaica for America in search of her best friend and first love, leaving her young daughter, Tru, behind. While Tru reaches adulthood in the shadow of her absent mother, Patsy slowly creates a life for herself in New York. This book is so rich and complex, full of vivid scenes and characters who are incredibly nuanced. It’s one of my go-to queer parenting recs, because it doesn’t simplify or neaten Patsy’s experiences as a mother, lover, queer Black woman, and undocumented immigrant. Patsy and Tru both deal with the repercussions of her actions over the course of the next ten years.

Torrey Peters ’ Detransition, Baby

This novel centers three women- two trans and one cis- navigating the murky possibilities of non-traditional family making. Reese has always aspired to be a mother. But she’s undoubtedly taken aback when her ex, a trans woman who now lives as a man, approaches her with a proposal: his girlfriend is expecting and he wants the three of them to co-parent the child. It’s a messy, funny, brilliantly human book about contemporary queer and trans lives.

Milk Fed by Melissa Broder

Rachel, a Jewish twentysomething woman who is dealing with a lot of emotional trauma, is the subject of this intense- and occasionally painful- book. Broder writes with so much honesty about bodies, desire, and sex. Although it’s not a simple or comfortable book, it’s worthwhile. She has a toxic relationship with her mother, and the book’s opening severely restricts her eating. When she meets Miriam, an Orthodox woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop, they fall into an all-consuming relationship.

Francesca Ekwuyasi’s Butter Honey Pig Bread

This stunning novel follows three Nigerian women: their mothers Kambirinachi and twins Kehinde and Taiye. Kehinde and Taiye were close as children but estranged as adults, this is the story of how they slowly find their way back to each other. The messiness of Taiye’s queerness especially resonated with me because the characters are so alive. Ekwuyasi is a master at creating heartfelt, vivid scenes. She captures so many emotions in simple everyday moments- cooking breakfast for a lover or a first date.

Jane Eaton Hamilton’s Weekend

You’re going to want to pick up this book if you’ve been looking for one with older queer characters and conversations that sound like they’re straight out of a real world. Ajax and Logan are a newer couple on their first weekend getaway. This book is full of fights and mistakes, harm and forgiveness are offered, sex, challenging conversations, humor, pain, and celebration. In summary, it has a little bit of everything. Joe and Elliot have been together for decades, and now have a newborn. It follows two queer couples over the course of a weekend, both of whom are at significant turning points in their relationships, set on a small island in Ontario.

Zaina Arafat’s You Exist Too Much is available from

This novel opens with upheaval. A bisexual Palestinian American woman who is the narrator breaks up with her girlfriend after discovering her infidelity. She checks herself into The Ledge, a rehab facility that treats ”love addiction,” determined to break a lifelong pattern of obsessive longing, affairs, and pining after unavailable women. What follows is a dizzying journey of self-discovery, as she begins to reckon with her past, her relationship with her mother, and, most importantly, herself.

Jia qing wilson-yang’s Small Beauty is available on Amazon.

One of my favorite books to date, and I could go on and on about it for a long time. It’s a quiet, gorgeously told, shimmeringly alive book about queer lineage, ghosts, immigration, trans friendship, grief, silence, belonging, and the power of stories. She spends the following year grieving, meditating, reminiscing, finding new family, discovering new ones, and examining her past memories. It’s the story of Mei, a transgender Chinese Canadian woman whose dearly beloved cousin recently passed away. He leaves her his house, so she departs her life in the city to live in the small town where she grew up.

Emily Hashimoto’s A World Between

Leena Shah and Eleanor Suzuki cross paths while attending college in 2004. They fall in love fast and hard, with all the whirlwind possibility of new adulthood. It’s a difficult book to ignore. This is such a lovely book about what it means to develop into adulthood. Hashimoto captures all the tumultuous, hesitant, confusing, and bewildering emotions that come with real change. It’s about how much of the interconnected relationships that make up a life change over time. Years later, as adults, they rekindle their friendship and their old one rekindles.

Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett

Jessa takes over the family taxidermy shop after her father committed suicide. It’s frequently uncomfortable and dark. If you like brutally honest family stories, you’ll want to pick this up. This book is no exception to Aaron’s love of the weird. It’s up to her to keep the family, and the business, from disintegrating because her mother and brother are engulfed in their own grief. Which means she has to face her feelings for her sister-in-law, and maybe actually figure out who her family is, and how she fits with them.

Jean Kyoung Frazier’s Pizza Girl

She lives with her loving boyfriend and supportive mother, who recently gave birth to her daughter. She is pregnant and has just graduated from high school. Jane makes so many bad choices. She works as a pizza delivery person, so she meets Jenny, a young mother with whom she grows more and more obsessed. This is one of my favorite books about teenage characters. They’re thrilled about the baby, but she isn’t. There are a lot of suffering and errors. However, it’s a profoundly honest, thoughtful book about the difficulties of finding oneself and the simple but powerful experiences that can change a person’s life forever.

Hazel Jane Plante’s Little Blue Encyclopedia ( For Vivian )

This amazing tale is written in the form of an dictionary for a mythical Television display called Little Blue, one of the funniest, most changing, and most innovative novels I’ve always read. The transgender person who is the storyteller has only passed away from her best companion, Viv. The reading is excellent. This brief reserve contains a lot of lifestyle. Although it becomes obvious that the storyteller had feelings for Viv, this is not an unfulfilled like narrative. It’s fascinating to watch the hypothetical Television display. Always will I miss the storyline tone. It’s a tale of companionship. Little Blue is a party of their companionship and a method for the storyteller to approach her pain because Viv was obsessed with it.

Matrimony of a Thousand Lies by SJ Sindu

Both Krishna and Wonderful are homosexual. However, when Wonderful reunites with her first like, Nisha, she finds herself reevaluating her decisions for living. She examines Lucky’s turbulent ties with Kris and Nisha, as well as with prolonged relatives, particularly her aunt, and herself. Although the story column of a common character enters into safe relationships is well known, Sindu explores the complexity of it. They have their own livelihoods and were married to satisfy their Sri-Lankan United communities. It is a subtle tale about family and community that honours the variety of selections gay females make to thrive.

Elaine Castillo’s America Is Not the Soul

Hero, a homosexual Filipina girl who immigrates to the United States, is the main protagonist in this familial home epic. The majority of this book takes place in the 1990s, so I suppose it’s physically traditional, but it does make a few places of a backswitch to the 2000s, but I’m counting it. It’s a tale about all the people and narratives that they carry, and how those tales shape ties. to live with her aunt and uncle after spending the majority of her youth fighting in the opposition under Ferdinand Marcos ’ rule in the Philippines. The sapphic enjoy history in this text was so heart-pounding that I couldn’t stop thinking.

Kate Davies ’ In at the Deep Ending

This ominously humorous reserve explores the playful perils of contemporary love and romance as well as the very authentic soreness. A twenty-something woman in London who has a hated work, a gladly married companion, and a longing for a day hasn’t happened in a while. When she encounters a fascinating lady at a group, she enters a complete new universe of gay investigation, which is both thrilling and risky. Julia’s battle to figure out what she needs ( and wants ) is a terrible trip to go through, and it is also very relevant.

Choose Carefully Read Karen Havelin’s Leaflet, by Satisfy Examine It.

Laura, a perennially sick Scandinavian expat living and working in New York and taking care of her fresh princess, is the protagonist of this book. The narrative follows Laura’s living as she travels through period, her numerous interactions and clinics gets, her early years in Norway and New York, and the shifting experiences of living with chronic disease. I was unable to put it down. The system and the natural earth are the subjects of the publishing, which is so dead and solidly rooted in them.

Jen Silverman’s We Play Yourself

Cass, a young lesbian poet, experiences her second major success during her first major production. There are so many different types of bisexual interactions in this, as well as so many different types of sapphic associations, including connections, mentor-mentee relationships, intense relationships, romances, and rivalries. It explores the connections between depiction and self-expression and craft. In the fallout, she flees to L.A., where she begins working on a video job that initially appears incredible but gradually turns out to be everything fully fully different.

Mesha Maren’s Sugar Run

This tale, which is set in remote West Virginia, begins with Jodi McCarty’s release from jail. It’s about the charges of hunger and prison in Alpine areas, about the consequences of second chances, and how simple it is to lose power in the face of seemingly infinite challenges. This reserve isn’t particularly cheerful or brilliant. Simply it doesn’t go as planned. They both decide to make a raw stop along because they are both looking for one. She stumbles upon and falls in love with Miranda, who just lost prison of her youngsters.

Tanwi Nandini Islam’s Bright Lines

Ella and Charu, two relatives, are the focus of this community epic set in Brooklyn and Bangladesh. The two females were raised as daughters, and Ella, who was orphaned as a child, lives with Charu’s home in Brooklyn. Although this skillfully plotted book contains numerous intersecting storylines, it always feels like Islam has grown very little. Ella and her home deal with a number of catastrophes that lead them on a trip to Bangladesh and into their history over the course of one summertime while attending school. The story of each character is just as captivating.

Morgan Rogers ’ Honey Girl

Grace Porter has just finished her astronomy PhD, and to celebrate, she travels to Vegas with her two closest friends. I admire Rogers ’ honesty in her writing about therapy, familial pressure, and academia. A woman who has always adhered to the rules of her own life experiences what happens when she breaks free of it in this novel. marries a woman she doesn’t know and is intoxicated. She decides to put her career on hold and travel to New York to meet her wife, Yuki, while trying to figure out what’s next in her life. However, this is not a romance.

Emily M. Danforth’s Plain Bad Heroines

Although this book has a significant historical plotline, I’m including it anyway because a ) at least half of it is contemporary and b ) it is so damn sapphic. Are there any straight characters in it at all? Don’t quote me, but I don’t recall any. It explores contemporary lesbian culture and hidden queer history in an eerie, strange, and occasionally creepy way. A group of queer actors and filmmakers are featured in a movie about a vile boarding school for girls.

Looking for other excellent Sapphic books? Danika also compiles a fantastic list of literary works about bi and lesbian relationships ( which only includes one book from this list )! You’re going to want to fix that, pronto, if you didn’t read any of these sapphic books from 2019. If that’s not enough sapphic books, you can always browse our LGBTQ archives. If you’re looking for classics from a variety of genres, check out 100 Must-Read Bisexual and Lesbian Books.

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