20 Must-Read Contemporary Sapphic Novels
With lesbian authors pushing the boundaries of theme and genre, there is so much to explore. These are your must-read sapphic books.
When you look at lesbian novels and the art created by lesbian authors, you will find both dark gothic fiction and bright dedications to love and kindness.
Whatever genre you enjoy, from historical fiction to sea monster tales, and if you enjoy crossing time and space, there’s something for you here.
Meaning of Sapphic Novels
Sapphism is an umbrella term for attraction or relationships between women, regardless of whether they identify as lesbian, bisexual, pansexual, asexual, transgender, or queer.
Lesbians, bisexuals, and queer women who do not identify as bi or lesbian are all included in Sapphic novel.
Sapphic books can be of any genre, with sapphic characters but not necessarily romance. Some books are about women who fall in love with other women, while others are not.
About Sapphic Novels
Danika recently wrote an excellent piece about sapphic YA and its various manifestations. She mentioned that one of the reasons she enjoys reading sapphic YA is that there are far fewer sapphic novels available in adult literature.
I’m not going to argue with Danika, who runs the equally wonderful Lesbrary and whose sapphic book knowledge is unquestionably superior to mine. I’m just here to tell you that there are a lot of incredible sapphic novels out there for adults, as someone who reads more adult lit than YA lit and whose reading life revolves around queer books.
I’m not saying there’s as much adult sapphic lit as I’d like to see. It most emphatically isn’t. But in the last few years, I’ve read a ton of amazing sapphic novels. There are so many that I couldn’t fit them all on this list of 20.
Right now, I’m staring at my bookshelf, and several sapphic titles 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 have not yet read them!)
Because I chose to focus on contemporary books, I omitted a few historical favorites, including Cantoras by Carolina De Robertis, The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue, and Stray City by Chelsey Johnson. I didn’t even venture into the realm of speculation.
List of Must-Read Contemporary Sapphic Novels
I tried to include as many different types of sapphic experiences and lives as possible when compiling this list. Lesbians, bi+ women, and queer women who do not identify as bi or lesbian are featured in these books (hi, hello, it’s me, I see you).
They are written and starring cis and trans women. Some include romance, while others do not. Some are about bisexual women who are in relationships with men.
Some are about healthy relationships, while others are about obsessive, toxic relationships. Some have happy endings, while others do not. They are about parenting, friendship, grief, work, family, art, illness, and figuring out who you are.
They occur in cities, small towns, and rural settings. There is both queer and human suffering. There’s humor, heartbreak, and, most importantly, a whole lot of magnificent and frustrating life.
Finally, this list contains some of my absolute favorite reads from the last few years, in any genre. It’s just a starting point.
Patsy by Nicole Dennis-Benn
Patsy is a gay woman who flees Jamaica for America in search of her best friend and first love, leaving behind her young daughter Tru. Patsy and Tru both struggle with the consequences of her actions over the next decade.
Patsy gradually makes a life for herself in New York, while Tru grows up in the shadow of her absent mother.
This novel is rich and complex, with vivid scenes and complex characters. It’s one of my go-to queer parenting recommendations because it doesn’t neaten or simplify Patsy’s experiences as a mother, lover, queer Black woman, and undocumented immigrant.
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
This novel centers on three women two trans and one cis navigating the murky possibilities of non-traditional family-making.
Reese has always wanted to be a mom. But she’s definitely surprised when her ex, Ames, a trans woman now living as a man, approaches her with a proposition: his girlfriend is pregnant, and he wants the three of them to co-parent the baby.
It’s a messy, funny, brilliantly human book about contemporary queer and trans lives.
Milked Fed by Melissa Broder
This is an intense at times excruciating book about Rachel, a Jewish twentysomething woman working through a lot of emotional trauma.
She has a toxic relationship with her mother, and, when the book opens, is severely restricting her eating. When she meets Miriam, an Orthodox woman who works at her favorite frozen yogurt shop, they fall into an all-consuming relationship.
Broder writes with so much honesty about bodies, desire, and sex. It’s not an easy or comfortable read, but it’s a worthwhile one.
Butter Honey Pig by Francesca Ekwuyasi
This gorgeous novel follows three Nigerian women: twins Kehinde and Taiye and their mother Kambirinachi. 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.
Ekwuyasi is an absolute master at writing poignant, vivid scenes. She captures so many emotions in simple everyday moments cooking breakfast for a lover or a first date.
The characters are so alive, and the messiness of Taiye’s queerness especially resonated with me.
Weekend by Jane Eaton Hamilton
If you’re been searching for a book featuring older queer characters and conversations that feel like they’re straight out of real life, you’re going to want to pick this one up.
Set on a small island in Ontario, it follows two queer couples over the course of one weekend, both at major turning points in their relationships. Joe and Elliot have been together for decades and now have a newborn. Ajax and Logan are a newer couple on their first-weekend getaway.
This book is full of fights and mistakes, harm caused and forgiveness offered, sex, difficult conversations, humor, pain, and celebration. In short: it’s got a little bit of everything.
You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat
This novel opens with upheaval. The narrator, a bisexual Palestinian American woman, breaks up with her girlfriend after she discovers her infidelity.
Determined to break a lifelong pattern of obsessive longing, affairs, and pining after unavailable women, she checks herself into The Ledge, a rehab center that offers treatment for “love addiction”.
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.
Small Beauty by Jia Qing Wilson-Yang
This is one of my favorite novels ever, and I could go on about it at length. It’s the story of Mei, a Chinese Canadian trans woman whose beloved cousin has just died.
He leaves her his house, so she departs her life in the city to live in the small town where she grew up. She spends the next year grieving, remembering, reconnecting with family, discovering new family, and delving into her memories of the past.
It’s a quiet, gorgeously told, a shimmeringly alive book about queer lineage, ghosts, immigration, trans friendship, grief, silence, belonging, and the power of stories.
A World Between by Emily Hashimoto
Eleanor Suzuki and Leena Shah meet as college students in 2004. They fall in love fast and hard, with all the whirlwind possibilities of new adulthood.
Years later, as adults, both patterned with different people, they meet again and their old connection bubbles up.
This is such a beautiful book about what it means to grow up and settle into adulthood. It’s about all the interconnected relationships that make up a life, and how much those relationships shift over time.
Hashimoto captures all the tumultuous, hesitant, confusing, and bewildering emotions that come with real change. It’s a hard book to look away from.
Mostly Dead Things by Kristen Arnett
In the wake of her father’s death by suicide, Jessa takes over the management of the family taxidermy shop.
With her mother and brother engulfed in their own grief, it’s up to her to keep the family, and the business, from falling apart. This 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.
Arnett revels in the weird, and this book is no exception. It’s often dark and uncomfortable. If you like brutally honest family stories, you’ll want to pick this up.
Pizza Girl by Jean Kyoung Frazier
Jane has just graduated from high school and she’s pregnant; she lives with her loving boyfriend and supportive mother.
They’re thrilled about the baby, but she isn’t. She works as a pizza delivery person, and this is how she meets Jenny, a young mother she becomes increasingly obsessed with. I love books featuring messy teenage characters, and this is one.
Jane makes so many bad choices. There is a lot of pain and a lot of mistakes. But under all that, it’s an incredibly honest, thoughtful book about how hard it can be to figure yourself out, and the ordinary but powerful experiences that can alter a life forever.
Little Blue Encyclopedia (for Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante
One of the funniest, most moving, and most creative books I’ve ever read, this surprising novel is written as an encyclopedia for a fictional TV show, Little Blue.
The narrator is a trans woman whose best friend Viv has just died. Viv was obsessed with Little Blue; the encyclopedia is a celebration of their friendship and a way for the narrator to process her grief.
It soon becomes clear that the narrator was in love with Viv, but this isn’t an unrequited love story. It’s a friendship story. The writing is superb. The fictional TV show is fascinating. There is so much life in this relatively short book. I’ll never forget the narrative voice.
Marriage of a Thousand Lies by SJ Sindu
Lucky and Krishna are both gay. They got married to appease their Sri-Lankan American families, and they have their own lives. But when Lucky reconnects with her first love, Nisha, she finds herself reconsidering her life choices.
Queer people entering into protective marriages is a familiar plot line, but Sindu delves into the complexities of it.
She explores Lucky’s tumultuous relationships with Kris and Nisha, but also with extended family, especially her grandmother, and herself.
It’s a nuanced story about family and community that honors the many kinds of choices queer women make in order to survive.
America is Not the Heart by Elaine Castillo
This intergenerational family saga focuses mostly on Hero, a queer Filipina woman who immigrates to the U.S. to live with her aunt and uncle after spending most of her young adulthood fighting in the resistance during the reign of Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos.
She slowly builds a new life and new family in California. The sapphic love story in this book took my breath away. It’s a novel about all the stories and histories a person carries, and how those stories shape relationships.
Most of this book takes place in the ’90s, so I guess it’s technically historical, but it does skip ahead a bit to the 2000s in a few places, so I’m counting it.
In at the Deep End by Kate Davies
This dark comic book explores the humorous pitfalls, as well as the very real pain, of modern love and romance.
Julia is a twentysomething living in London with a job she hates, a roommate who’s happily coupled, and a yearning for a date, which she hasn’t had in a while.
When she meets an intriguing woman at a party, she enters a whole new world of queer exploration which is both exhilarating and dangerous. Julia’s struggle to figure herself out and get what she needs (and wants) is a painful journey to witness, and a very relatable one.
Please Read this Leaflet Carefully by Karen Havelin
This novel opens with Laura, a chronically ill Norwegian immigrant living and working in New York and taking care of her young daughter.
Moving backward through time, the story chronicles Laura’s life: her various relationships and hospital stays, her childhood in Norway and young adulthood in New York, and the shifting realities of living with chronic illness. I couldn’t put it down.
The writing is so alive, so firmly rooted in the physical world and body.
We Play Ourselves by Jen Silverman
Cass is an up-and-coming bisexual playwright whose career implodes during her first big show. In the aftermath, she flees to L.A., where she gets involved with a film project that seems amazing at first but slowly reveals itself to be something else entirely.
There are so many different kinds of bi rep in this, and so many kinds of sapphic relationships: friendships, mentor-mentee relationships, obsessive relationships, romances, and rivalries.
It’s about the intersections between art and fame and representation and self-expression.
Sugar Run by Mesha Maren
Set in rural West Virginia, this novel begins on the day Jodi McCarty gets out of jail. On her meandering journey to get home, she meets and falls for Miranda, who has recently lost custody of her children.
They’re both looking for a fresh start, and they decide to make one together. Only, it doesn’t go as planned. This is not a bright, happy book.
It’s about the costs of poverty and incarceration in Appalachian communities, about consequences and second chances, and how easy it is to spiral out of control in the face of seemingly endless obstacles.
Bright Lines by Tanwi Nandini Islam
This family saga, set in Brooklyn and Bangladesh, centers on two cousins, Ella and Charu. Ella, orphaned as a child, lives with Charu’s family in Brooklyn; the two girls were raised as sisters.
Over the course of one summer during college, Ella falls in love while the family deals with a series of crises that lead them on a trip to Bangladesh, and into their past.
There are many intersecting storylines in this deftly plotted novel, but it never feels like Islam has taken on too much. Each character’s story is equally riveting.
Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers
Grace Porter has just finished her Ph.D. in astronomy; to celebrate she heads to Vegas with her two best friends and…gets drunk and married to a woman she doesn’t know.
Back at home, trying to figure out what’s next in her life, she decides to put her career on hold, and head to New York to get to know her wife, Yuki. This book isn’t a romance, though.
It’s a novel about a woman who’s always stuck to the plain laid out for her, and what happens when she breaks free of it. I love how honestly Rogers writes about academia, familial pressure, and therapy.
Plain Bad Heroines by Emily M. Danforth
This book has a strong historical thread running through it, but I’m including it because a) at least half of it is contemporary, and b) it’s so damn sapphic.
Are there even any gay characters in it? I don’t recall any, but don’t take my word for it. The plot revolves around a group of queer filmmakers and actors who are working on a film about a cursed girls’ boarding school.
It’s about contemporary lesbian culture and hidden queer history, and it’s eerie, strange, and a little creepy at times.
