No generation before you has had access to this many lesbian books. Lesbian novels, lesbian essays, lesbian theory, lesbian historical fiction, lesbian memoirs, lesbian coming-of-age, lesbian short stories, lesbian erotica – it’s a rich abundance. A feast just waiting for you to tuck into. So take advantage of it. Book bans might be on the rise but that only makes it all the more important to read widely and deeply. Knowledge is power, representation changes lives and lesbian love can be poignant, political, devastating or hot depending on which of these books you decide to dive into. 

Here are some of our favourite books by and about lesbians and queer women. And special shoutout to the ones that didn’t quite make the cut but still come highly recommended: Fried Green Tomatoes by Fannie Flagg, Thank You for Calling the Lesbian Line by Elizabeth Lovatt, Almost Life by Kiran Millwood Hargrave, The Colour Purple by Alice Walker, and Carmilla by J Sheridan Le Fanu.

NIGHTWOOD, DJUNA BARNES

It took me several attempts to first get through Djuna Barnes’s 1936 novel Nightwood. A modernist story (TS Eliot edited it, wrote an introduction and helped get it published), its prose style can be unwieldy and intense, as Barnes is unconcerned by the usual rules of structure and form. But Jeanette Winterson’s description of the book – “reading it is like drinking wine with a pearl dissolving in the glass. You have taken in more than you know, and it will go on doing its work. From now on, a part of you is pearl-lined” – proved irresistible to me, and made me return again and again until it finally unlocked. The trick? Don’t read it as a plot that you need to keep track of (or as sentences that need to make sense), but let your mind relax completely, release control and allow yourself to be carried away by the language and free-flowing poetry of the prose. (AP)

THE FIRST BAD MAN, MIRANDA JULY

With my dying breath, I’ll be recommending Miranda July’s books. The First Bad Man is an astonishing story which invites us to inhabit the bizarre mind of its narrator, Cheryl Glickman, a single woman in her mid-40s who works for a non-profit women’s self-defence charity in Los Angeles. Her life is profoundly solitary – her boss has suggested she work from home because her “management style works best from a distance”; she has no friends, she has a debilitating psychosomatic medical condition, her habits of self-sufficiency are rigid to the point of obsessive compulsive, and her interior monologue is fantastical and unhinged. Aloneness is a habit she practices and perfects every day. Then, through an intricate and surprising sequence of events, her world is forced to expand as life’s messiness begins to encroach on her isolation. It’s hard to describe the lesbian element without risking revealing too much about the story – I’d prefer to allow it to unfold with its own confounding momentum. But I have read and re-read this novel multiple times, and I find it staggering each time. Please read; I will never stop banging on about it. (ED)

AFTER DELORES, SARAH SCHULMAN

Today Sarah Schulman is perhaps better known for her non-fiction books, including Conflict is Not Abuse, The Gentrification of the Mind and last year’s excellent The Fantasy and Necessity of Solidarity, as well as her tireless activism for HIV justice and Palestine, among other causes. But she is also a wonderful novelist, and After Dolores is my favourite (although bonus shout-out to Rat Bohemia and People in Trouble.) In terms of the plot, it’s basically a hard-boiled detective novel: after being dumped by her girlfriend, an unnamed narrator sets out to solve the murder a young go-go dancer, which leads her on a journey through the queer underworld of late 1980s downtown New York. It’s satisfying as a straight-up crime novel, but really I love it for its cool, noirish prose, including a passage I’ve remembered often over the years:

“Spring can be the best time in the city because it’s so emotional, but some years it only lasts a day. This year it rained cool and gray for two weeks, which gave everyone enough time to think something over. But as soon as the sun came out, it got hot and that was the end of that.” (JG)

SUNBURN, CHLOE MICHELLE HOWARTH

True to its name, reading this book made me feel warm and lightly seared. In a small conservative town in 1990s Ireland, we follow Lucy’s journey through adolescence as she falls for her best friend Susannah. Living inside Lucy’s head is torturous – I don’t miss being a teenager and feeling every feeling this intensely, like you’d die if the girl you liked didn’t read the note you passed her during class. It’s an ode to the insufferability of youth, being yet to develop the concept of other peoples’ feelings, and how painful and messy first love can be. I also love the excessiveness of the prose – what’s in the water in Ireland? (KH)

VALENCIA, MICHELLE TEA

A wonderfully disgusting book. I’m a fan of pervert literature, and so much of Tea’s memoir is about how many fingers she can stick where and how much lube she needs to do it. It’s stressful and invigorating; she’s hopping on buses with no return fare in her pocket and seeing where it takes her, running scams and running her mouth. Much like Sunburn, it captures the heightened feeling that when you’re young, time is yours to waste. The urban underground scene, though, allows for a wider range of queerness to be explored; Michelle fucks around and finds out with every kind of butch or dyke that San Francisco has to offer. It you are a fan of Valencia, you should also check out Eileen Myles’s Chelsea Girls which is just as messy, chaotic and sexy. (KH)

FINGERSMITH, SARAH WATERS

Sarah Waters is one of the greatest writers of historical fiction at work today, queer or not, and it’s difficult to choose just one of her books, but Fingersmith just about edges it for me. Set in an evocatively rendered Victorian England, it follows an orphan who gets involved in a scam against a wealthy heiress, which involves posing as her maid and convincing her to elope with an older man, who will then commit her to an asylum and steal all her money. This fiendish plan is complicated when the two young women develop feelings for each other and, without giving anything away, the novel has one of the best plot twists I’ve ever read – I gasped! It’s a big, gripping Dickensian yarn, and, for all the treachery and betrayal involved, also a moving and at times erotic love story. A bonus shout-out to Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, which transposes the action to Korea under Japanese colonial rule – one of the rare film adaptations that’s just as good as the source material. (JG)

NOTES OF A CROCODILE, QIU MIAOJIN

Set in Taipei, Taiwan, during the late 1980s, post-martial law era, Notes of a Crocodile centres around narrator Lazi as she falls in love with a female classmate, and befriends a vibrant and eccentric cast of queer characters at her prestigious university. Like all coming-of-age tales, no one really knows what they are doing as they search for answers on how to form human connections and learn to love, all without having any models of what and how queer love can be. Presented as a collection of eight notebooks, Qiu Miaojin’s book is a postmodern pastiche of diaries, vignettes, mash notes, aphorisms, exegesis, and satire told from the the perspective of a crocodile living its life in a human suit. (AP)

DON JUAN IN THE VILLAGE, JANE DELYNN

Described by critic and sexuality expert Susie Bright as the best lesbian erotic novel of all time, Don Juan in the Village follows the narrator – the titular lesbian Don Juan – through bars across Morocco, Ibiza, Puerto Rico, Greenwich Village and more as she recounts three decades of encounters with women around the world. In 14 tales of sexual conquests, failures and existential anguish she meets everyone from movie stars and sex workers to grocery store clerks. “Sexual descriptions are explicit, the literary quality is high,” as Publishers Weekly succinctly summed it up in their review. How can you resist that? (AP)

PRIVATE RITES, JULIA ARMFIELD

Private Rites, Julia Armfield’s follow-up to her debut Our Wives Under the Sea, sees the apocalypse come to Britain’s shores. In this dystopian vision of the future, the world doesn’t end in ice or fire – it ends in rain, with floods and deluges routinely swallowing up entire buildings and houses. When sisters Isla, Irene, and Agnes’ father dies, he is cremated – because “there’s no way to bury a body in earth which is flooded”. Billed as a queer retelling of King Lear, Private Rites follows the three women as they grapple with their grief as the world ends around them. (SS)

WHEN I DARE TO BE POWERFUL, AUDRE LORDE

I’ve never been the subject of racism, nor homophobia, nor misogyny myself, but while When I Dare to be Powerful centres on all of these intersectional experiences, it is relevant to people from all walks of life. Of course, there’s a lot to be learned from the personal anecdotes that the late, great Black feminist writer, professor and poet shares throughout this collection of essays. But I think the true magic of this book is in Lorde’s emotional lucidity, her ability to recognise her own fallibility and also know when to… dare to be powerful. (SP-M) 

SEVEN HUSBANDS OF EVELYN HUGO, TAYLOR JENKINS REID

As a history graduate and general history lover, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo felt like it was written specifically for me. This heartbreaking, romantic and completely engrossing historical fiction follows journalist Monique Grant as she writes up what will be the last interview with Old Hollywood movie star, Evelyn Hugo. The book tells the story of her life through the men (and women) she loved. As I read the book, I couldn’t help but think of Jane Fonda, and her HBO documentary Jane Fonda in Five Acts, which tells the story of her life through her marriages. While it can appear that these stories define their lives through the men they loved, Fonda’s documentary and this book are ultimately about these women, their struggles under patriarchal domination and how they became the women that they are today. And of course, it’s also about the enduring love between Evelyn and fellow actress Celia St James as they navigate the 1950s Hollywood system. This book has lots of twists and turns, and I personally think it’s Taylor Jenkins Reid’s best work (although read her novel Atmosphere for astronaut lesbians! And try The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden for more lesbian historical fiction.) (HJ)

WRITTEN ON THE BODY, JEANETTE WINTERSON

It would be wrong not to include a Jeanette Winterson book on this list, especially since she is the reason for my commitment to Nightwood. Coming seven years after her famous debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, Winterson’s Written on the Body follows an unnamed narrator as they embark on a passionate affair with a married woman in the quiet English suburbs. If you are one of those readers who loves yearning, who wants desperate accounts of desire from characters who are all consumed by their obsession and devotion (“your flesh is my flesh” etc), who loves sweeping poetic language and explicit sex, then this is for you. (AP)

GREASEPAINT, HANNAH LEVENE

Like Don Juan in the Village, Hannah Leven’s debut novel explores the bar as an ecosystem and the living centre of the lesbian experience. Greasepaint sees an ensemble cast of butch dykes and Yiddish anarchists spending eternal Friday nights around the table, at union meetings, on the dancefloor and at the bar, set against a backdrop of 1950s New York. As sweaty thighs push together and conversations overlap, the characters debate about Gershwin, flirt, organise and sometimes break into song. Alongside that, the book is a meditation and celebration of butchness – the struggles and the euphoria, the oppression and the ecstasy. (AP)

HIJAB BUTCH BLUES, LAMYA H

I’ve already written about Hijab Butch Blues for a list of memoirs we published last month (which you should read) but I couldn’t not include it in this article as well. A play on the title of one of the most famous lesbian books ever written, Stone Butch Blues, Lamya H’s memoir recounts her life growing up as part of a Muslim family in a Middle Eastern country. These experiences are completely different to my own non-religious London upbringing, yet her writings about her relationship with her sexuality, struggles with queer dating, and efforts to allow herself to be vulnerable enough to form real connections resonated with me more than almost any other book I’ve read. (AP)

RUBYFRUIT JUNGLE, RITA MAE BROWN

Molly Bolt is a great character. Confident, unapologetic, quick-witted and very funny, it’s not hard to believe so many women fall in love with her – even in 1950s and 60s rural America. Rubyfruit Jungle follows Molly through her early life and young adulthood and the relationships with women she has along the way (including one which Chappell Roan could have used as inspiration for “Good Luck Babe”). 

Written in the 70s, Rita Mae Brown’s novel is considered one of the first lesbian literary works, and it was notable for portraying a queer character in a positive light. A product of its time, the book reflects contemporary discourse which believed butch/femme roles in lesbian relationships to be heteronormative. Discussions around that may have changed, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still read and disagree with things! (AP)