Historical fiction featuring queer storylines or characters.
| Author | Title | Blurb |
|---|---|---|
| Waters, Sarah | Tipping the Velvet | A coming-of-age story about a "male impersonator" in London in the late 20th century. |
| Waters, Sarah | Fingersmith | Part Gothic horror, part Gothic lesbian romance. The plot twist will make your head spin. |
| Waters, Sarah | The Paying Guests | Lesbian romance, Gothic novel sort of setting, murder, suspense. This novel showcases Sarah Waters' ability to build tension. |
| Boyne, John | The Absolutist | Follows a homosexual soldier during WWI. If you're not in the mood for something sad, I do not recommend reading this. It messed me up for a good two weeks. |
| Donoghue, Emma | The Pull of the Stars | A novel about a nurse working in a hospital during the Spanish Flu. Takes place over the course of twenty-four hours. Wildly compelling but it definitely made me cry. |
| Sharratt, Mary | Summit Avenue | WLW novel that takes place in the Twin Cities in the 1910s. Compelling and well-researched. |
Non-queer historical fiction.
| Author | Title | Blurb |
|---|---|---|
| Waters, Sarah | The Little Stranger | This book got me into Gothic novels. Another example of Waters' ability to build tension. |
| Kostova, Elizabeth | The Historian | Somehow managed to become my favorite book despite my not liking vampire novels. Suspenseful, amazing sense of setting, and I love the way it's structured - a narrative being told to you years after the fact combined with letters and other documents the narrator uses to figure out the mystery at the heart of the story. |