Best Sapphic Books

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The contemporary canon

• Casey McQuiston — Red, White & Royal Blue (2019). The book that proved queer romance can own the bestseller list. A m/m romance, but McQuiston's wider catalog (including the sapphic-adjacent One Last Stop) is essential context for how commercial sapphic romance broke through.Find One Last Stop on Amazon →
• Alison Cochrun — Kiss Her Once for Me (2022). A Christmas-adjacent slow burn that understands how sapphic romance works best: yearning, restraint, and one perfect conversation that changes everything.Find Kiss Her Once for Me on Amazon →
• Emily Henry — Beach Read (2020) and follow-ups. Not strictly sapphic, but the commercial beach-read wave Henry helped create is where many readers first discover that romance can be smart, literary, and queer-inclusive.Find Emily Henry on Amazon →

Gothic & Historical

Women in castles, women in history

• Sarah Waters — Tipping the Velvet (1998). The definitive Victorian sapphic bildungsroman. If you want to understand how historical lesbian fiction works, start here.Find Tipping the Velvet on Amazon →
• Sarah Waters — Fingersmith (2002). A con, a twist, a house full of secrets, and one of the most celebrated sapphic love stories in literary fiction.Find Fingersmith on Amazon →
• Carmilla — J. Sheridan Le Fanu (1872). The ur-text of sapphic vampire fiction. Short, hypnotic, and still the reason gothic lesbian romance exists.Find Carmilla on Amazon →

Fantasy & Speculative

Other worlds, same ache

• Tasha Suri — The Jasmine Throne (2021). The epic sapphic fantasy everyone points to — and with good reason. A princess, a maidservant, forbidden magic, and an empire that never recovers.Find The Jasmine Throne on Amazon →
• Samantha Shannon — The Priory of the Orange Tree (2019). Dragons, queens, and a slow-burn sapphic romance at the center of a standalone doorstopper. The perfect "I want scope" recommendation.Find Priory on Amazon →
• T. Kingfisher — Nettle & Bone (2022). A fairy-tale quest with warmth, weirdness, and a queer found family. Ideal for readers who want fantasy that feels intimate rather than imperial.Find Nettle & Bone on Amazon →

Hidden gems

Books that deserve a wider shelf

• Torrey Peters — Detransition, Baby (2021). A literary novel about gender, intimacy, and the reconfiguration of long queer friendship into something more. Sharp, humane, and impossible to look away from.Find Detransition, Baby on Amazon →
• Emily M. Danforth — Plain Bad Heroines (2020). Nested stories across a century, gothic and meta and quietly sapphic in every timeline. One of the most distinctive novels of the decade.Find Plain Bad Heroines on Amazon →
• Emma Donoghue — Learned by Heart (2023). Two schoolgirls in Regency York whose whispered friendship becomes the love story that shaped Anne Lister's life.Find Learned by Heart on Amazon →

From the Laura & Maya shelf

If you want something new

The Laura and Maya novels sit across several of the categories above — romance, gothic, Ice Age survival, and pulp science fiction. If none of the classics quite match what you're looking for, the books below were written specifically for the same readers searching "best sapphic books."

Laura Chambers Is the Apocalypse in a Sweater

A quiet archaeology student, a disruptive urban planner, and a library table that becomes the beginning of everything.

Read the first chapter here →Find on Amazon →

Tell Me About the Lions

Laura Chambers was meant to study the past. Instead, she was left inside it. An archaeologist trapped in the Ice Age must survive the world she once knew only through its ancient art.

Read the first chapter here →Find on Amazon →

Miss Chambers and the Countess

A reserved Victorian scholar travels to a remote Carpathian castle to catalogue ancient manuscripts and finds herself drawn into an intimate, dangerous relationship with the immortal Countess who lives there.

Read the first chapter here →Coming Soon

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