20 Must-Read Contemporary Sapphic Novels

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.

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 in “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.

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, shimmeringly alive book about queer lineage, ghosts, immigration, trans friendship, grief, silence, belonging, and the power of stories.

Eleanor Suzuki and Leena Shah meet as college students in 2004. They fall in love fast and hard, with all the whirlwind possibility 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.

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. 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. 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.

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, 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.

One of the funniest, most moving, and most creative books I’ve ever read, this surprising novel is written in the form of 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.

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.

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. In California, she slowly builds a new life and new family for herself. 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.

This darkly 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.

This novel opens with Laura, a chronically ill Norwegian immigrant living and working in New York and taking care of her young daughter. Moving backwards through time, the story chronicles Laura’s life: her various relationships and hospital stays, her childhood in Norway and young adulthood in New York, 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.

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.

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 on Appalachian communities, about consequences and second chances and how easy it is to spiral out of control in the face of seemingly endless obstacles.

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.

Grace Porter has just finished her PhD in astronomy; to celebrate she heads to Vegas with her two best friends and…gets drunk 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.

This book has a big historical plot line running through it, but I’m including it anyway because a) at least half of it is contemporary and b) it is so damn sapphic. Are there even any straight characters in it? I don’t remember any, but don’t quote me. The story follows a group of queer filmmakers and actors involved in a film about a cursed girls’ boarding school. Eerie and strange and a bit creepy at times, it’s about contemporary lesbian culture and hidden queer history.