Award-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling novelist Kiran Millwood Hargrave’s pick of the best queer love stories tackle everything from first crushes to homophobia.
My Summer of Love by Helen Cross
This was my first literary encounter with explicitly lesbian longing – it’s full of the race-and-snails-pace time takes on as a teenager, especially during the summer holidays. It’s also smart on class, power, and the particular cruelty of young girls.
This is How You Lose the Time War by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
A beautifully written epistolary work of science fiction, this gripping and tender novella spans time, space, loyalty and betrayal, to create a mesmeric musing on love as resistance.
Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield
Queer to its bones Armfield’s gothic, lush yet wry story of how to love a changing person launched a thousand imitations of tone. It’s strange and suffused with deep devotion.
The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall
Along with Giovanni’s Room and The Price of Salt, this is a true foundational classic riddled with the prejudices and homophobia of its age. Interesting as a historical text and compelling as a novel.
A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland
Set in 1980s south Wales, the prose is stunning in this debut about the relationship between two men whose love is necessarily restrained, concealed, and all-consuming.
