Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 353 - On the Shelf for October 2026 - Transcript
(Originally aired 2026/10/03)
Welcome to On the Shelf for October 2026.
For those who have been following the saga of my broken wrist, I’ve been officially released from physical therapy. I still have some range-of-motion issues, but they’ll have to work themselves out through ordinary activity.
One new thing I’ve been doing this summer has been attending a lot of local book festivals and Pride events to sell my books as part of the Bay Area Queer Writers Association. It’s been an interesting and enjoyable experience to have so much interaction with potential readers (who don’t know me at all) and pitch our books to them. It seems like every community in the San Francisco Bay Area has its own local Pride Festival—fortunately they spread them out across the entire summer. It’s been fun to see the venues flooded with people of all ages, often whole families, enjoying being themselves in public. And, ideally, buying books!
Another thing I’ve spent the last few months on has been an essay on lesbian history that I donated to the Romancing the Vote auction, which raises money for voting rights organizations. The requested essay was a good excuse to work on a substantial chunk of the book version of the Project. A previous similar donation resulted in what will eventually be a booklet on How to Be a Lesbian in the English Regency. Originally, I was planning to include these setting-specific write-ups as part of the overall book, but when I started looking at word counts it made more sense to issue them separately. So it’s possible that I’ll begin publishing the side projects before the book itself is ready, which should help stir interest.
And, of course, this is your regular reminder that we’ll be running the podcast’s fiction series for the last time in 2027, with submissions accepted in January. See the link to the call for submissions in the show notes.
News of the Field
While I was putting together the new book listings this month, I ran into a relatively new publisher, Lavender Octavo, whose stated mission is, “reviving public domain works of interest to lesbian readers.” The website lists titles such as Pierre Louÿs’s Song of Bilitis, Rosamond Lehmann’s Dusty Answer, Mary Casal’s The Stone Wall, Renée Vivien’s translation of Sappho, and Adele Spitzeder’s The Story of My Life. Online listings of titles coming out next year include A. T. Fitzroy’s Despised and Rejected, Compton Mackenzie’s Extraordinary Women, and Ángeles Vicente’s Zezé. Original publication dates range from 1878 to 1928. Because these are all reprints and don’t exactly count as “historical fiction,” I’m not going to include them in the new book listings, but if you’re interested in early overtly lesbian books, I encourage you to check out the publisher. I’ve included a link in the show notes.
Publications on the Blog
Other projects elbowed some of my reading time out of the way, so the only new publication I’ve blogged is Leah DeVun’s The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. The study covers a variety of topics falling under the rubric of “non-binary” including mythological motifs, intersexuality, alchemical symbolism, and religious theory. I’ll be doing a podcast in the near future talking about why the history of intersexuality is relevant to the history of lesbianism. There’s at least one more book I want to read before I work on that topic.
Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
When it comes to new fiction, we once again have a superfluity. So once again I’ll be condensing the cover copy in most cases, rather than reading the sometimes lengthy originals. (When cover copy was limited by needing to fit on an actual book cover, I think we didn’t get quite such lengthy essays. I have opinions on this topic, but I’ll save them for now.)
I want to reiterate my policies for these listings. I will not knowingly promote a book written using large language models. I have a set of criteria I use for evaluating books, but I can’t guarantee that my criteria won’t throw off false positives or false negatives. I used to include non-English books when I found them, but I’ve had to stop doing that because too many are AI translations and I don’t have the expertise to distinguish them. If I include a book that appears to use an AI cover, I will mention that, but in general AI covers are a strong predictor of AI content, so I give them extra scrutiny.
As usual this months books have a strong emphasis on the 19th and 20th centuries. Out of the 27 titles in the main group, only 4 are set before 1800, although all three titles in the “other books of interest section” are.
August books start with The Price of Treason by Corinne Astier.
In the blood-stained heart of 1793 Paris, Yvette Bardin operates 'The Silk Road,' a covert network smuggling innocents past the reach of the guillotine. Her dangerous double life as a seamstress and resistance leader is shattered when she is summoned to the Conciergerie—not by a common guard, but by Catherine Lambert, the revolutionary prosecutor and the woman who once held Yvette’s heart.
As you might guess, there’s going to be a bit of enemies and lovers action going on.
A continuing Western saga appears in Staying Above the Snakes (Wild Hearts on the Western Frontier #2) by Carmilla Deane from Lewis and Young Publishing.
The Two of Hearts ranch was supposed to be a fresh start for Harriet Jane Grant and her partner Grace—40 head of breeding stock, eighteen calves, a new corral, and a promise that Harriet’s bounty hunting is behind them. By September 1875, Harriet has buried her bounty hunter’s days beneath a rancher’s promise. Then a wealthy railroad man arrives with two thousand dollars and a story about a missing daughter. The money could stock the north pasture before winter kills the grass. But the truth Harriet finds in the Cache la Poudre Canyon isn’t the one she was paid to discover, and the journey home will force her to break every vow she made—or stand her ground and fight for what she’s built.
Flora: My Heart Will Pay the Price (Motherline Saga #2) by Amber L. Ricketts appears to be the only sapphic story in this series.
In 1919, on an orchard in Massachusetts, Flora is getting married in three weeks. Her mother, Beira O'Shea, has arranged a good match. But while visiting a friend in Boston, Flora stumbles into The Achillean, an old vaudeville theatre where the owner and cast live strange, secretive lives. Especially one performer: the mysterious Dani. Captivated, Flora stays in the city under false pretenses and tries to join the underground troupe.
While Flora explores the excitement and dangers of the big city, old secrets are being unearthed back home.
A Divine Comeback by David Imper from East 52nd Street is real-person fiction exploring an imagined encounter.
Greta Garbo. Marilyn Monroe. Two legends the world believes it already knows the ending to. New York, 1966 proves otherwise.
Struggling playwright Simon Goldberg only wants one thing: to get his play about Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse onto a Broadway stage. He never expects his search for a leading lady to lead him straight to Greta Garbo herself—or that a chance encounter will pull Marilyn Monroe into the same secret production.
Behind locked doors and hidden entrances, two of the most famous women in the world rehearse for the comeback of the decade. As opening night draws closer, secrets strain, hearts open, and the cost of being seen again becomes impossible to ignore.
September books start off with a pair of Regency novels by Verity Fairbanks from Inked Pages, following up on a previous release in the same series. It looks like the books all stand alone. The first is A Companion for Miss Ledbury (Fallowmere Novels #2).
Miss Honora Ledbury just has to survive her uncle’s Christmas house party for twelve days until her thirtieth birthday unlocks her inheritance. Her uncle has other plans, like marrying her to his son to cover up the fact that he’s spent the money to keep his glove-making business afloat. To escape those plans, Honora needs a lady companion at her side—so she hires one.
Miss Clemency Vane has been paid to be kind to difficult old women for seven years, and has just lost her last position without a reference. She plays whist as though she can hear the cards and sings the part in the carol nobody listens to. And she knows that Honora’s plans will cost the livelihood of the women in the glove-making factory.
Neither woman is wrong. That is the whole trouble.
The next book in this series is A Fortune for Miss Pomfret (Fallowmere Novels #3).
Worcestershire, September 1818. Miss Lavinia Pomfret is twenty-three, the cleverest person in her father's house, and the only one who reads the post. She has just discovered that her grandfather's marriage settlement left her ten thousand pounds — payable since her twenty-first birthday, and never once mentioned. Her father has spent every shilling of his income on foxhounds. A perfectly kind widower wants to marry her for the covert at the bottom of the garden. And the deed does not need her father's leave. It needs her trustee's. But the original trustee is dead with the trust passed to his daughter, and she has other concerns that Lavinia’s bequest would ruin.
Finding Each Other by Faithe Stephens from Henry Lyon Books explores a cross-cultural romance in the American western expansion.
Upper Michigan, 1820. Jessie has spent years building a life that asks little of anyone but herself. Deep in the wilderness, she has found solitude, competence, and something close to peace—if not quite the healing she once hoped would come.
Then she finds Waaseyaa. Injured, half-frozen, and far from home, the Ojibwe woman should be only another problem to solve. Jessie knows how to set a broken bone, tend a wound, keep a fire burning, and survive a northern winter. What she doesn’t know is what to do with the woman recovering beside her—or with the quiet friendship taking root between them.
A different type of cross-cultural romance is set during the American Civil War in Finding Freedom by Maggi Petton from Mercury HeartLink.
An unlikely trio is inexplicably united during the Civil War. Noni, strong, resilient and wise, endures the hardships of being ripped from her African home and living an unimaginable life of slavery in the American South. She can take anything—except the sale of her daughter, Efuru. Deep in a North Carolina forest, Noni and Efuru encounter Abby, a northern, white girl who has just escaped her kidnapper, a desperate AWOL Confederate soldier. This is their story of survival and forgiveness.
In What a Lady Wants by Viola Velarossi two women are challenged to choose to want something for themselves.
London, 1891. Beatrice Vale knows how to make a woman want something. She has spent seven years writing advertisements that other people praise her husband for. When Arthur claims her bold new catalogue as his own, Beatrice is expected to help quietly. Then Eleanor Shaw arrives to illustrate it: an independent artist with ink-stained hands, unpaid bills, and an inconvenient habit of asking Beatrice what she actually wants.
Working together brings small rebellions. A colour chosen for pleasure. A fee requested without apology. A kiss that makes returning home feel impossible. But Eleanor has already loved a married woman who wanted freedom only for an afternoon. She will not become another secret. And for Beatrice, leaving Arthur means more than walking out of a comfortable house.
Hidden Hearts (Fugitive Hearts #1) by Margaret Fridley is the start of a series set in the 1930s. The cover appears to be generated by AI but I see no suggestions that the content is.
Geraldine Grouder has spent five years making herself small inside a marriage that punishes her when she isn't. She times her market trips to the minute. She moves through the social halls of Calhoun counting Walter's tie-checks, reading his moods before they arrive. She has learned to perform adequate wife so precisely she has nearly forgotten there is anything underneath the performance.
Then a new schoolteacher walks through the doors of First Baptist Church on a Sunday in October — chalk dust on her sleeve, a leather satchel full of books, gray-blue eyes that find Geraldine across a crowded room and stop.
Mozella Pharras is everything Geraldine has been taught not to want: unmarried, educated, reckless with the truth. But she came to Calhoun on purpose. And falling in love was never part of the plan.
It’s quite understandable that the Russian female pilots known as the “night witches” carry a deep fascination for WWII novels, as in The Corrected Heading by William Ferrier Jr.
Zoya Belova has one gift the war cannot take from her: she can always find her way home.
In June 1942, she arrives at an airfield on the Volga steppe to join something the Soviet Union will spend decades trying to forget it built: a bomber regiment flown entirely by women. Paired with Vera Koloskova, a reckless, magnetic pilot who ties the same red scarf at her throat before every sortie, Zoya survives the only way she knows how, by counting. Fuel loads. Compass headings. Seconds between engine cut and bomb release. The number of times a searchlight can be outrun.
For three years they fly plywood biplanes over the German lines by night, becoming the regiment the enemy will come to fear and name. What Zoya cannot calculate is Vera, or the quiet, dangerous thing growing between them, or the paperwork moving through Moscow that could erase the regiment, and everyone in it, from the record before the war even ends.
On the other side of the Atlantic, the war-driven entrance of women into the industrial workforce is another favorite subject, as in The Riveter's Heart by Koda James.
Manhattan, 1944: Amidst the roar of a war factory, Vivan Arthur, a former army nurse, welds together more than just machinery. She’s meticulously rebuilding her own shattered peace, piece by painful piece. Her guarded heart, scarred by the battlefield, is a fortress no one can breach – until Elias Thorne, with an easy smile and an unsettling depth, sees past Vivan’s formidable defenses.
That’s a lot of books but we’ve only just gotten to the October titles, starting with The Stolen Women by Alysandra Dutton from Park Row, set in the classical world.
Safinia is fine to focus on her training as a warrior, providing for her sisters, and minding her own business. She feels no great need to meddle in anyone else's, until women in her town, including her former lover, begin disappearing. Quietly, at first, but disappearing just the same. All of the missing women have vanished from powerful households, but their formidable fathers are in utter denial, claiming their daughters are off on trips, sure to be back shortly, with perfectly reasonable explanations for their absences. Dissatisfied with the half-hearted attempts to hand wave away the alarming and mysterious cases of the vanishing women, Safinia takes matters into her own hands.
Of Her Blood by Rozina Hyland takes on cross-class romance.
Tilda knows her place: silent, obedient, unseen. In seventeenth-century Norfolk, England, where the nobility and Church rule with an iron fist, submission is survival, especially for a maid whispered to have witchcraft in her veins. Shunned by the staff and controlled by her masters, life consists of little more than making it through each day—until she discovers a connection with Imogen, the lord's daughter.
But as buried secrets surrounding her mother's execution for witchcraft begin to surface, and her bond with Imogen grows into something more, Tilda is forced to question everything she thought she knew. Why was she brought to serve this family, and what do her masters and the staff know about her past that she does not?
Beau Scamp by C. M. Harris from Last Laugh looks to be an enjoyable romp.
England, 1794: What a time to be alive!
Charlotte Goddard has spent her life performing. First, as Charlie, the stable hand raised in breeches by her highwayman father, and then as Beau Scamp, the notorious road thief whose reputation does considerably more work than her actual skills.
When a botched robbery brings her face to face with Lady Catherina Pemberton—the childhood friend Charlotte has loved since she was twelve—she finds herself talked out of fleeing to America to avenge her father’s death and instead talked into the most ill-advised disguise of her career: maid to the woman she’s desperately in love with, in the house she’s been robbing, and under the noses of everyone who wants her hanged.
Yet another author succumbs to the lure of following up on Jane Austen’s characters in Kitty (The Bennet Sisters #1) by T.J. Ryan.
After the death of Mr. Bennet, Kitty Bennet must leave Longbourn when her home passes to the relentless Mr. Collins. With her sisters married and the world she knew slipping away, she takes up residence at Pemberley as governess and companion to Elizabeth and Darcy’s children.
Amid the grandeur and quiet of Pemberley, Kitty discovers a life far beyond the frivolity of her youth. She secretly pursues her passion for writing, and in the process, forms a tender, unexpected bond with Georgiana Darcy — a connection that challenges society’s expectations and awakens a love she never anticipated.
We swing back to witchcraft and suspense in Raven by Lyndsay Faye from The Mysterious Press.
Raven Helen Allan has always been haunted by witchcraft. Since the death of her beloved mother, she has soothed herself by speaking words into spells—a proclivity enhanced by time spent with her aunt’s library of occult books. But when the household is threatened with financial ruin, Raven must set out to earn her own living.
Taking a job as a paid companion, Raven arrives at the crumbling Moldavia Manor. Her charge is a delicate young invalid named Lenore Legrand who haunts the Gothic structure like a phantom. Living with them is Lenore’s devoted older cousin Travanion, who shares Raven’s interest in the occult and devotes his days to searching ancient texts for an Elixir of Life that might cure his cousin. Raven finds herself inexorably drawn to both cousins as well as to the secrets hidden in the shadows of Moldavia Manor.
And now we’re back to the wild west in Where Ashes Bury Her (The Women of Sapphire #1) by L. Creeke.
Sawyer Hayes and Charlotte Windsor fought like hell for the chance to choose each other. As they leave West Wind behind and make their way toward Sapphire, they’re carrying more than they packed into their saddlebags. Lottie is determined to reclaim every piece of herself that was taken from her, refusing to bow her head for anyone ever again. Sawyer would burn the whole damn world before letting someone hurt the woman she loves, but she’s beginning to learn that protecting Lottie doesn’t always mean standing between her and the danger. Sometimes, it means trusting her to face it.
I’m beginning to think that I should have organized this months books by genre rather than setting, for we’re back to the occult in Rottenheart by Kat Dunn from Zando, which sets up a gender-flipped Hamlet.
1898 Hampstead, London: Odette’s mother is dead. Before the funeral rites have concluded, body not yet buried, her once-estranged aunt, Claudine, takes over as the family’s matriarch. Not long after, she is announced as Odette’s new step-mother and the household reorders itself around Claudine's every command. As Odette reckons with this betrayal, a sinister presence begins to make itself known—and it is desperate for revenge.
Odette’s childhood best friend and lover Cecilia is caught in the middle. As Cecilia’s affections are tested in the face of Odette’s spiraling madness, so too is her duty to her family when they find themselves bound to Claudine by a buried secret.
My Darling Girls by Marina Scott from Lake Union Publishing features an unusual profession.
In 1904 Chicago, where secrets cling as thickly as the soot on every windowsill, Jo earns her living by photographing the dead. The work is quiet and cloistered, allowing her to hide from a past that haunts her: the grief over her husband’s mysterious death, a spiraling addiction, and the guilt she carries over the things she’s done to survive.
When a notorious crime family hires Jo to make a final portrait of their daughter Millie, it stirs up a spirit that refuses to rest. In opium-fueled dreams, Millie lures Jo into a realm called “the courtyard,” where the dead burn to tell her their half-finished stories.
As Jo investigates Millie’s murder, she forms a fragile bond with her sister, Grace, who’s desperate for an escape of her own. Amid the whispers of the dead is a truth Jo must confront if she is to free them all from the shadows of the past.
The Translator by Annabelle Marx from Storm Publishing starts during WWI in Malta.
Two women escape military duties and discipline: swimming in secret coves, in basement bars of Valletta, they forge a bond that will shape the rest of their lives. After the war they take separate paths, bound by letters that slip gradually from mischief to darkness. Then, after two years of silence, Edie receives a parcel from Paris–three detective novels, all in French, no sender, no note–and her world shifts on its axis.
Her dearest friend, Vee Saunders is presumed dead, her body never found. As politicians murmur condolences to Vee’s powerful husband, Edie sits with a fury she can barely contain. She knows things about this marriage no one in the room would dare speak aloud. And she refuses to believe that Vee is gone. She closes her eyes and she’s back in the warm Mediterranean water – the salt on her skin, Vee’s hands keeping her afloat, that voice in her ear: don’t worry, I won’t let you sink… And Edie works to translate the novels.
Inspired by the origins of Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca, Unspeakable Things by Elizabeth Hand from Little, Brown and Company is a historical thriller.
It's the 1920s and the English countryside is quiet—which suits Olivia and Tamsin, two young women happy to be overlooked by society. Their relationship is complicated: unruly, working-class Tamsin was brought to Kerrith Manor to be tutored at Olivia's side, but the two quickly have found something more than friendship—a bone-deep recognition that ignites an endless passion.
But an unexplained death and an unexpected visitor soon disrupt their idyll, sending both women on the run. They find harbor at Ledges, the dazzling estate of ruthlessly wealthy and endlessly mysterious Rex D’Hiver. At Ledges, a favorite hang-out for the wealthy, bohemian Bright Young Things eager to cut loose far from London’s prying eyes, Olivia and Tamsin at last experience the heady power of true freedom…and soon, its deadly cost.
In one of those coincidences of publishing, The Housekeeper by Rose Tremain from Harper is also inspired by Rebecca, a little more closely than the preceding.
Mrs. Danowski is hired as housekeeper at Manderville Hall, Lord Grenville-Whithers’ mansion on the wild coast of Cornwall. A loyal and lonely woman troubled by childhood memories of alienation, Danni dreams of finding love. Those dreams are fulfilled when Daphne du Maurier arrives at Manderville Hall for lunch with Grenville-Whithers. Succumbing to her secret sexual desire for women, Daphne begins a love affair with Danni, meeting on the housekeeper’s days off in the secluded boathouse at Manderville Cove. For both women, this forbidden passion is both beautiful and terrifying. But of course such a love cannot last—and both Danni and Daphne must deal with the aftermath of their passion. While Danni struggles to find a new place in the world, Daphne reconfigures the experience into her most famous work, Rebecca, with surprising results.
Venus, Vanishing by Rebecca Birrell from Henry Holt & Company is set in the heyday of Berlin between the wars.
Hannah Sherman has deviated from the traditional narrative arc of a woman’s life. After rejecting an arranged marriage, she leaves home to join the city’s underground art scene, reveling in its clubs and galleries with newfound friends and lovers. Working as a tailor while studying art in every spare moment, Hannah comes to know women and their bodies, first with measuring tape and silk, and later through sensuous layers of paint.
Hannah feels like she can finally call herself an artist when a wealthy female art collector, commissions her to make an elaborate series of nude portraits. But after Hannah finishes the acclaimed Venus paintings, she discovers that her work is being tampered with and exhibited under a man’s name. When lines between artist and muse are crossed in an intoxicating but perilous affair, Hannah transforms her art into an act of revenge, finding herself caught up in a devastating game of survival.
Espionage and adventure lead the way in Angel on Fire by Annette Pritchard.
With a traitor in her department and an agent already dead, enigmatic Intelligence Chief Dr Isadora Kensington is a woman in trouble. Isolated and under fire, she’s about to put her faith in an untested rookie. Will the biggest gamble of her life pay off, or will it cost her everything?
American heiress Serafina de’Angelo is charming, wealthy, and desperate to escape an arranged marriage. Anxious to explore her hidden attraction to women, she jumps at the chance to cross the Atlantic to help a stranger. Serafina expected adventure, but Isadora’s world of seductive shadows demands far more. Falling in love was never part of the plan—but now she’s locked in the game of her life, and Isadora’s survival depends entirely on her.
I’ve gotten a little more picky about including “romance of the archives” stories that take place primarily in the present day, but I’ll make an exception for Upstate by Kim van Alkemade from William Morrow Paperbacks.
Thirty-four-year-old writer Audrey Beacon is grieving alone during lockdown when a post about a bookshop for sale in upstate New York pops into her social media feed like a lifeline. Enthralled by the historic house and the massive barn bursting with books, Audrey impulsively makes an offer. Soon, she’s cashing out her savings, loading her possessions into her dead husband’s van, and fleeing Manhattan for the village of Schuywich, determined to outrun the ghosts of her past.
In 1956, it’s love at first sight when Schuywich librarian Hazel McIntyre meets dashing magazine writer Evelyn Cabot at a summer camp in Maine that discreetly promises a “different vacation for professional women.” By summer’s end, Evelyn has left Greenwich Village to move into an old farmhouse she’s bought in Hazel’s hometown. In her new column, “The Upstate Dispatch,” Evelyn writes about her adventures renovating a house, tending to sheep, and opening a bookshop in her barn with help from the woman readers know only as her “roommate.” Privately, Hazel chronicles their six-decade love story in a series of letters that abruptly end when they’re forced to abandon the bookshop in 2015.
Past and present begin to converge when Audrey finds “The Upstate Dispatch” in a stack of old magazines, but it’s the discovery of Hazel’s letters that brings hidden love and long-buried family secrets to light.
Although I’m generally arranging these listings by the date of the setting, this next book sorted out at the end because I honestly have no idea when it’s supposed to take place. And, in any event, All's Fair in Love and Duty by Sarah Jacklin & Phoebe Rose from Launch Point Press is clearly taking place in an alternate version of whatever era it is.
Two best friends are after the same girl: one for love, the other for her family. Can their friendship survive this season of first loves and secrets? When her father’s finances fail, Eliza Ashworth is forced to find a wealthy match in this year’s crop of eligible singles. One star-eyed bachelorette recently bequeathed a sizeable fortune catches her eye. The only problem? Her best friend Charlotte is feeling butterflies for the same girl. Can their friendship survive this season of first loves and secrets? Or is all fair in love and duty?
Other Books of Interest
I put three books in the “other books of interest” section because although they’re tagged LGBTQ+ and turned up under my keyword searches, I can’t tell for certain from the cover copy what the sapphic content might be.
The Soldaderas by Sofia Guadarrama Collado tells the story of the first revolution in Mexico: the women's revolution.
Told in the voice of Cecilia who later became Adelita, the revolution began quietly in the mid-Porfiriato period, when women joined the workforce as office workers, telegraphists, journalists, newspaper editors, nurses, midwives, and doctors—something society frowned upon and considered idle, unnecessary, and dangerous, since for centuries women had been educated for marriage, motherhood, and housework.
It was the journalists and editors who organized and drove the beginning of the women's movements and made the first demands to the government about gender-based abuses throughout the country. And it was the soldaderas who consolidated the women's revolution and with their bravery demonstrated the strength of women, for without them, the Mexican Revolution would never have survived.
Death by Misadenture by Jane Bitomsky from Lake Union Publishing starts out as a cozy historical mystery. It sounds like the female character might be secondary to the male coroner. Hard to tell.
April 29, 1585. Coroner John Derrick is summoned to the village of Bramley to investigate a naked dead man found beneath a waterwheel. An unfortunate drowning, by all indications. But upon closer inspection, the case takes a macabre turn: The deceased is missing a certain piece of his anatomy. Impelled by the grisly discovery to uncover the culprit, John must contend with bumbling villagers in his quest for the truth. Only sixteen-year-old maid Rebecca Laurence seems to offer any help.
In Elizabethan England, servants rarely get a second glance. Rebecca prefers it that way, moving quietly through her world, picking up secrets like dirty clothing. Knowledge is power at a time when women are afforded little, and she deftly wields hers to protect her own clandestine affairs. As John wades through the evidence, Rebecca treads into dangerous waters. And if she’s not careful, she could find herself in over her head.
There’s a lot of mystery in Beneath the Stone by Haven Reyes.
The year is 1730, Evelyn LeClair is twenty-six and nearly out of time. Her father’s arranged marriage for her is meant to secure the family’s standing, and Evelyn is expected to comply—just as she always has. But the older she gets, the more she feels the pressure tightening around her: the lies about her childhood “episode,” the gaps in her memory, the way her family watches her as though she might break.
Then a letter arrives. Impossible. Familiar. Meant only for her. It draws her toward the Paris catacombs, where the walls sweat with old secrets and the bones seem arranged with intention. What she finds there threatens the marriage planned for her, the legacy built above her, and the story her family has spent decades forcing her to believe.
Paris keeps its secrets buried. Evelyn is done being one of them.
Last Minute Addition
We have a last minute addition to this month’s books because the author was able to ger me a buy link right before I recorded. Ochre, or Quartz, or Ivy by Jeannelle M. Ferreira is a historic fantasy following a non-binary Arthur and their queen across time. I should note that I was asked to blurb this book and enjoyed it immensely, as I usually do with Ferreira’s poetic narrative style.
Mor is the queen in a story that’s been sung forever, and she knows it; but flowing through every story, like blood in a living heart, there is a price. One quiet morning, Death steps into the house and calls Mor by name. She finds herself pulled loose from her own place in time: into memories not yet lived, lives not yet lost, and devotion tested across centuries.
Pen rules a country built on dragons' bones. Time curves around them like an ammonite, all ripples and refractions. They are not ordinary, but they try to be. They try to be everything their world asks, even as they chase the answer to one question from the Ice Age to the Iron Age and further.
What Am I Reading?
And what have I been reading lately? According to my spreadsheet, I only listened to three books in September, one of which I noped out of early on. I could swear there were more, but I guess not. I finished another of the Jeeves and Wooster novels, which is exactly what it pretends to be and there isn’t much more to say. My did-not-finish was a sapphic time-travel body-swap romance, The Regency Switch by Helen Gaskell. I thought it might be a bit like Pride and Prejudice and Pittsburgh, which I enjoyed back in March, but this one didn’t grab me and the historicity of the past setting was too badly flawed for me to want to continue.
On the other hand, A Lady's Guide to Scandal by Sophie Irwin was absolutely delightful. At first I wasn’t quite sure why I’d picked it up, because it starts with an ordinary heterosexual Regency romance plot with an dreadfully mousy and bullied new widow finding herself in a Persuasion-like plot with a previously rejected sweetheart and his dashing, scandalous rival. But then there’s a very sweet and very plot-relevant sapphic side couple. I think it was more fun seeing that thread develop, having forgotten to expect it, than it would have been if I’d been impatiently waiting for it to show up. That’s something of my dream: that there could always be sapphic characters showing up in any given story, even if they aren’t the main course. It turns out, I did include the book in the new book listings, back three years ago, when I listed it under “other books of interest” so maybe I had a vague memory of that when I spotted the title? My reading is so backed up that it isn’t unusual for me to forget why I added something to my to-be-read list. That can lead to some pleasant surprises.
Show Notes
In this episode we talk about:
- Summer book selling
- Spin-off projects from the blog
- An interesting new publisher: Lavender Octavo
- Recent and upcoming publications covered on the blog
- DeVun, Leah. 2020. The Shape of Sex: Nonbinary Gender from Genesis to the Renaissance. Columbia University Press, New York. ISBN 978-0-2311-9551-5
- Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction
- Other Titles of Interest
- Last Minute Addition
- What I’ve been consuming
- The Regency Switch by Helen Gaskell
- A Lady's Guide to Scandal by Sophie Irwin
- Call for submissions for the 2027 LHMP audio short story series. See here for details.
Links to the Lesbian Historic Motif Project Online
Links to Heather Online
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billroper) wrote2026-10-03 11:55 pm
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