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Around the World in Lesbian Fiction

You know you’ve heard the complaint. You’ve probably even voiced it yourself: “I’d like to read more lesbian novels, but there’s nothing good out there.” The only problem? It’s simply not true.

The 12 novels listed here (in order of publication) — all set outside the U.S. and published in the past couple of decades — include romances, tragedies, mysteries and coming-of-age stories. Whatever narrative style or type of story appeals to you, you’ll find it here, in well-written books that take you around the world, from Edinburgh and Helsinki to Toronto, New Delhi and Sydney.

To pare down the list, a few admittedly arbitrary criteria were applied. The novels had to feature a lesbian main character, with allowances made for how difficult it is to define both “lesbian” and “main character.” No attempt was made to select the authors’ most recent or most famous books, and Sarah Waters’ and Jeanette Winterson’s many deserving novels were left off the list to make room for lesser-known works.

Regardless of the criteria, the list below remains woefully incomplete, but then that’s the point: There really is a lot of good lesbian literature out there, just waiting for you to discover it.

Fair Play by Tove Jansson (1989) – Finland

“Just one thing … It is simply this: do not tire, never lose interest, never grow indifferent – lose your invaluable curiosity and you let yourself die. It’s as simple as that.”

Fair Play is a slender and deceptively simple book about two older women in Helsinki whose shared daily life reveals a lifetime’s worth of wisdom about love and work.

The novel is composed of a series of connected vignettes featuring Mari, a writer and illustrator, and Jonna, a filmmaker and artist. It must be said that very little happens in the book: The first chapter is about rearranging pictures, the next about watching movies. But if you slow down – and somehow in reading this novel, you can’t help but slow down to appreciate every carefully chosen word – you’ll uncover an elegant story about how life’s smallest moments reveal underlying truths about art and relationships.

Jansson is an internationally famous writer and illustrator of children’s books who wrote Fair Play (one of her 11 books for adults) in her mid-70s, surely basing it in part on her long-term partnership with a female graphic artist. In the novel, Jonna and Mari bicker and debate and – often through small touches and glances – reveal their love for one another while providing insight into the artist’s life, the compromises of relationships and the space we all need, in our work and our personal lives.

At once playful and thought-provoking, Fair Play is a quiet but masterful novel that deserves to be read again and again.

The Four Winds by Gerd Brantenberg (1989) – Norway, Scotland

“Inger hunched over the picture and studied it, and knew at once that this girl – the unknown Scottish girl there in the tiny picture – would be her new catastrophe.”

Perhaps because it is a translated work sold by a small publisher, The Four Winds is (at least in the United States) not nearly as well known as it deserves to be. Written by one of Norway’s leading feminist authors, the novel is a deeply funny, insightful and semiautobiographical story about coming of age (and coming out) in 1960s Norway.

While serving as an au pair in Edinburgh for a year and, later, studying at the University of Oslo, Inger Holm suffers a series of what she calls “catastrophes”: “There was always,” she notes, “some girl who came along and made her legs unreliable.” Inger’s droll observations and wordplay lightens an agonizing series of personal events that take place in the midst of the social upheaval and gay liberation movement of the 1960s.

Brantenberg’s story is best in its bittersweet moments, as when Inger watches Ingmar Bergman’s The Silence, and for the first time sees one woman declare her love for another. Inger’s straight friend (another catastrophe) is completely unmoved by the film. But Inger feels, and reminds us of, the personal and cultural significance of the moment: “Finally, the truth had been told – in a completely public place – without the woman who said it immediately going and hanging herself. Oh, Good God, what a long time it had taken!”

Women of the Silk by Gail Tsukiyama (1991) – China

“She reached over and put her arms around Lin, feeling something she had never known before, the smallest hint of fear, gradually giving way to desire.”

Set in early 20th-century China, Women of the Silk focuses not just on the historic hardships facing women in that country – although that is part of the story – but on the women’s enduring strength, friendship and courage.

The book follows Pei, a young woman born in rural China in 1919, who is sent by her domineering father to work at a silk factory. Initially frightened by life in the city, where she lives in a home for female silk workers, Pei soon forms a familial bond with her fellow workers and with the nurturing woman who runs the home. Pei ‘s relationship with one worker named Lin is particularly close, although the text (including the quote above) suggests but never explicitly states that they are lovers.

Tsukiyama, winner of an Academy of American Poets Award, pulls off something extraordinary in Women of the Silk, bringing a time and place alive without being heavy-handed with her feminist objectives – and while creating an ensemble of distinct, appealing characters.

Pei, who is also the subject of a second novel by Tsukiyama, will stay with you long after you finish reading, as will her parents, Lin and several of the other women whose lives revolve around the silk factory.

The Monkey’s Mask by Dorothy Porter (1994) — Australia

“How can I tell

she doesn’t love me?

easy

it’s not just her fidgeting fingers

      or how often

          she doesn’t touch me

it’s the slack of her shoulders

it’s the slack of our talk

I’m too easy

she doesn’t love me.”

What makes The Monkey’s Mask so powerful? Just listen to what Porter wrote in the Australian Humanities Review about the passion she poured into it:

I wanted ingredients that stank to high heaven of badness. I wanted graphic sex. I wanted explicit perversion. I wanted putrid language. I wanted stenching murder. I wanted to pour out my heart. I wanted to take the piss. I wanted lesbians who weren’t nice to other women. I wanted glamorous nasty men who even lesbians want to f—. I wanted to say that far too much Australian poetry is a dramatic cure for insomnia.

That’s right, the P-word. Only this is not a book of poetry, but rather a novel in verse (later adopted for stage and radio, as well as a film starring Kelly McGillis). Set aside your expectations, and you’ll find this murder mystery is one long, satisfying adrenaline rush as Jill Fitzpatrick, a chain-smoking lesbian private investigator, hunts down the killer of a 19-year-old girl named Mickey. It appears that Mickey’s sexual infatuations may have led to her death — but that does nothing to deter Jill from becoming sexually involved with a suspect in the case.

Porter, one of Australia ‘s best-known poets, has said, “There is nothing hotter than a terrific verse novel.” Read The Monkey’s Mask, a bold right uppercut of a book that the London Times named one of the best of the year, and you’ll see she’s right.

Cereus Blooms at Night by Shani Mootoo (1996) — Caribbean

“I wonder at how many of us, feeling unsafe and unprotected, either end up running far away from everything we know and love, or staying and simply going mad. I have decided today that neither option is more or less noble than the other.”

Cereus Blooms at Night, by out lesbian Shani Mootoo, is a startlingly good first novel, a book rightly compared to Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things and praised by no less than Alice Munro as a “story of magical power.”

The novel is narrated by Tyler, an effeminate, sometimes cross-dressing male nurse who lives in the town of Paradise on the fictional Caribbean island of Lantanacamara. When the apparently senile and supposedly murderous Mala Ramchandin is dropped off at the poorhouse where he works, nobody will touch her except Tyler, who knows a thing or two about being isolated and feared for being different.

Tyler slowly unravels the mysterious, multigenerational tragedy (including a clandestine lesbian affair) that destroyed Mala and her family. Their story is part of Mootoo’s wider exploration of the need to accept differences and the heartbreaking repercussions when we do not.

Fall on Your Knees by Ann-Marie MacDonald (1996) — Canada

“I’ve never heard anyone talk like her or play like her but then, when I hear her play, I feel as though I’m hearing music for the first time.”

Selected for Oprah’s Book Club, Fall on Your Knees is an epic novel about secrets — the kind that drive you to drinking, prostitution, violence and the edge of a cliff. And, when you’re lucky, to a new life somewhere else.

Four sisters grow up in the early 1900s on Cape Breton Island, just off the coast of Nova Scotia. They live in a small mining town, where they learn traditional lessons about loving the lord and fearing their father. As the town struggles through World War I, the influenza epidemic, the Great Depression and more, the sisters struggle (often with great humor) through sometimes unfathomable pain and abuse in their secluded home.

When one sister escapes to New York City, she enjoys the novel’s most passionate romantic relationship. Though it takes up just 60 of the novel’s 500 pages, her interracial lesbian love affair plays a central role in the plot, as two talented, stubborn women show what can happen when people have the courage to reveal their secrets.

In Another Place, Not Here by Dionne Brand (1996) — Caribbean and Canada

“I abandon everything for Verlia. I sink in Verlia and let she flesh swallow me up. I devour she. She open me up like any morning.”

A New York Times Notable Book, In Another Place, Not Here is a fevered dream of a novel that will enthrall those drawn to Brand’s poetic language, which has earned the out lesbian writer comparisons to Michael Ondaatje and Toni Morrison.

The book is broken into narrative halves so Elizete and Verlia, two starkly different women, can tell their separate but intertwined stories. Elizete is an impoverished woman who has spent her life working the cane fields on an unnamed Caribbean island, always dreaming of escaping to a better life. Elizete has a brief, life-changing affair with Verlia, an educated woman who has abandoned her life as a left-wing activist in Toronto, Canada, to return to her Caribbean birthplace, where she hopes to help organize a revolution.

Often breathtakingly beautiful and filled with haunting images, Brand’s novel will be most rewarding for those who enjoy unraveling deeply challenging works.

Dare Truth or Promise by Paula Boock (1997) — New Zealand

I’m in love with that girl, she heard as it reverberated inside her head. And it was a truth, she realised, as things are which you don’t think, but discover have always existed.”

Winner of the New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year Award, Dare Truth or Promise is a reminder of how good young adult literature can be, no matter how familiar its premise.

Luisa “Louie” Angelo is a self-assured actress and comedian from a middle-class, religious home who falls hard for Willa, a strong-willed new classmate still struggling to deal with the repercussions of her first lesbian relationship. Willa’s mother has already accepted her daughter’s lesbianism, but Louie’s family is shocked when they discover their daughter has fallen in love with another girl. When Louie’s conservative mother tries to end her daughter’s newfound relationship, an agonizing and almost disastrous separation follows.

Boock is a gifted storyteller, and Louie and Willa are memorable characters whose love is compelling and whose struggles, both internal and external, are both painful and believable.

Like by Ali Smith (1997) — Scotland, England

“It’s like, like — I said, and I stopped, I couldn’t think what it was like, it was Amy’s heart, it wasn’t like anything else.”

Leave it to Ali Smith, the out, two-time Booker Prize nominee, to shatter the conventions of the girl-meets-girl romance. The trappings are there: the tension-filled first meeting between adolescents from different worlds (urban England and rural Scotland ), their early flirtation and forced separation, and their long-awaited, tension-filled reunion. What’s missing in Smith’s fractured, lyrical story is the obvious, longed-for resolution.

Amy and her 8-year-old daughter, Kate — who deserves a book of her own — narrate the opening of the novel, in which a mystery slowly unfolds about their itinerant lives in Scotland, and why the obviously intelligent Amy is unable to read. Roughly halfway through, the novel switches to Aisling’s (Ash’s) point of view. Her diary entries provide a more direct, but never fully revealing, description of the women’s fractured relationship and its lasting repercussions.

The truth is elusive in this demanding novel, but Kate, Amy and Ash — and breathtaking, playful prose from an immensely gifted author — make the story’s many challenges worthwhile.

Daughters of Jerusalem by Charlotte Mendelson (2003) — England

“Confusingly, however, she has begun to smile into the pillow, and cannot stop. She, who had begun to feel fly-blown, dust-furred, is wanted. Wanted! She snorts through her nose into the feathers.”

What pleasure must have consumed Charlotte Mendelson as she wrote this award-winning novel, which both honors and skewers her hometown of North Oxford, England, a place she describes as “the land that style forgot.”

The story revolves around the Lux family. Victor, the father, is a “black-haired stooping wolfhound of a man,” a dreadfully boring professor altogether blind to his family’s ills. Jean, the mother, is, in Victor’s version of high praise, “less unkempt than the other women” at Oxford. Together (sort of), they raise Eve, a bright but jealous, self-loathing and self-mutilating teenager who dreams of killing her younger sister, Phoebe, a girl with the beauty and parental adoration Eve desires.

Recently named one of the 25 most promising British authors by British bookseller Waterstone’s, Mendelson, an out lesbian, has written several books that could be included here. Daughters of Jerusalem is a particularly funny and smart novel that exemplifies Mendelson’s style, as she examines family dynamics and explores the conflict between the desire to belong and, in one case, the need to escape into the arms of another woman.

Babyji by Abha Dawesar (2005) — India

“Delhi became suffused with a trembling beauty when the breeze blew or when I saw a blooming flower. Everything around me made me think of the two women I loved.”

What do you expect a 16-year-old lesbian in 1980s New Delhi to be? Sexually hesitant, uncertain, demure? If so, Baybji has a surprise in store for you.

Anamika Sharma is promiscuous and provocative, an adolescent intent on escaping innocence in part by diving into the arms of seemingly every woman she meets. In one erotic scene after another, she seduces a much-older divorcĂ©e, her servant and a classmate — and contemplates liaisons with one or two others as well. As she explores her own lesbian desires, she also tackles India’s class issues and a series of profound philosophical questions.

Anamika is, she acknowledges to herself, more Humbert Humbert than Lolita. And as Ali Smith notes, Babyji — winner of a Stonewall Book Award and Lambda Literary Award — is as bold as its young narrator; it is, Smith says, one “cunning lithe defiant sexy tiger’s roar of a book.”

Lost and Found by Carolyn Parkhurst (2006) — Egypt, Japan, Sweden, England, Ireland

“… it’s not like I think being on a TV show can change your life or make you a different person in any substantial way. But things do affect us, right? … Is it stranger to think you might learn something new in a situation like this than in any other life experience?”

Lost and Found is an unabashed page-turner, told by an ensemble of witty and interesting characters competing in a reality TV show similar to The Amazing Race.

The race includes two particularly interesting pairings. Linda enters the competition with her daughter, 18-year-old Cassie, a lesbian who hasn’t told her mother about her attraction to women — and who, in the year before the race, didn’t tell her mom about her pregnancy until the day she gave birth.

The race also includes a woman named Abby who went through a “Redemption” program to try to rid herself of her lesbian feelings. She runs the race with her husband, a fellow Redemption graduate who is desperately trying to overcome his own attraction to men.

The stories may be melodramatic, but Parkhurst makes you care, often deeply, about all the characters as they try to outrun their personal demons in the midst of their race around the world. Lost and Found is, in the best sense, an entertaining read, with more to say than … well, certainly more than any reality TV show.

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