The Best Queer Historical Fiction of the Century (So Far)

I was hard-pressed to decide which Taylor Jenkins Reid book most deserved a spot on this list—Daisy Jones and the Six is a wildly fun ride and The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is brilliant, plain and simple. But Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her very best. It’s equal parts character study and romance, but it’s also an exploration of what life was life for queer people, for women, and for those working on NASA’s space shuttle program in the 1970s and ’80s. Atmosphere is a microcosm of a particular moment in history, and it epitomizes everything Reid does so well as an author. —Rachel Brittain

De Robertis has achieved something exceptional with Cantoras by writing about what it was like to live in Uruguay’s dictatorship through the lives of five gay women who are looking for family, solace, love, safety, and freedom. Reading this during the current downfall of democracy in the U.S. was alarming but also hopeful. There is a beautiful spirit woven throughout the entire novel about creating family, enduring, finding/making a refuge, and what the future can be. Very few books have left me holding them as if to hug them into my body forever the way Cantoras did. And for all the sprinkles on top, De Robertis beautifully narrates the audiobook. —Jamie Canaves

I don’t say this lightly: Fingersmith is the best book I’ve ever read. It follows Sue, a petty thief in Victorian London who is taking on the con of a lifetime. She’ll pose as a lady’s maid for Maud and convince her to marry a man calling himself Gentleman, the mastermind of this operation. Then, Gentleman will put Maud in an asylum, and he and Sue will split her vast inheritance. Things get complicated when she begins to fall for Maud. Sarah Waters’s stunning writing is reason enough to pick this up, and the romance is unforgettable, but it’s the twisty plot packed with reveals and betrayals that elevates this to a modern classic. —Danika Ellis

We already named this one of the best romance books of the century so far, but in addition to the memorable love story, Telegraph Club shines in how firmly it is rooted in time and place; it could not take place anywhere other than San Francisco in the 1950s. Teen Lily Yu struggles to reconcile her budding romance with a female classmate with her role as the “good Chinese girl” at home. She faces racism at the local lesbian bar, and homophobia in Chinatown. Meanwhile, her father faces deportation for being swept up in the Red Scare, and her aunt develops technology for the space race. This is a beautifully written story that will transport you. —Danika Ellis

Mademoiselle Revolution is a brilliant novel that touches on the Haitian Revolution, the French Revolution, and the complex intersections of racism and identity. Through the biracial daughter of a plantation owner fleeing the Haitian Revolution, Sivak explores how a person can be simultaneously marginalized and complicit in the marginalization of others. Absolutely riveting historical fiction. —Rachel Brittain

My favorite setting to read about in historical fiction is 1920s Paris. The Last Nude is based on the life of Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka, and it made me fall in love with Ellis Avery as an author and de Lempicka as an artist. It’s about her relationship with one of her models, Rafaela, who was the inspiration for six paintings. It’s beautiful and melancholy, and completely pulls you into the setting—what I wouldn’t give to spend five minutes in the queer art scene of 1920s Paris. It will make you think about art, doomed romance, discovering your sexuality, our relationships to our bodies, queer history, and the nature of betrayal. —Danika Ellis

Given how many award-winning books have been written in this setting, it can feel like every possible angle has been covered—but The Lilac People proves that idea wrong. It follows trans men struggling to survive both Nazis and Allied forces, revealing the little-known history of Allied forces keeping queer Holocaust survivors imprisoned. This is an original and much-needed addition to the genre. —Danika Ellis

In 1617, nearly all the men of Vardø, Norway are killed in a freak storm off the coast. The women of the isolated town have to come together and overcome grief and any anxiety around gender roles to survive—but when a witch hunter comes to town, everything risks crumbling. This is a true story that Hargrave brings into vivid life, from the bleak, cold seaside to the subversive characters. This is a book set centuries ago but infused with a very familiar-feeling modern story: of queerness, radical womanhood, and a patriarchal status quo determined to stamp out anything that threatens it. —Leah Rachel von Essen

The Song of Achilles deserves every accolade it earns and every bump in the bestseller charts. It won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2012 and it is one of the first books that BookTok sent into the stratosphere. 

We all needed a book that emphasizes the love story between hero Achilles and exiled prince Patroclus from The Iliad. It will break your heart that Achilles chooses glory and destiny to fight in the Trojan War over peace and Patroclus. The book will break your heart over and over, and you’ll be glad for it. It also feels like it may have helped raise the profile of feminist and queer reframings of mythological stories. —Elisa Shoenberger

Bursting with ghosts and birds, Joukhadar’s poetic novel alternates between two timelines. In contemporary New York City, a Syrian American trans boy grieves his mother who died in a strange fire five years prior, and an illustrated journal uncovered in Little Syria divulges the mysterious life of Laila Z, a Syrian American bird painter who wrote to “B” about the U.S. and disappeared over half a century ago. Adorned with medals for the Stonewall Book Award and the Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Fiction, this hopeful story of ongoing conversations with beloveds delves into art, community, ornithology, personal histories, and resilience. —Connie Pan