Necessary Sacrifice


Noelle Winters - 2017
     Running a domestic violence shelter keeps Emma Stevens on her toes, and serves as a living reminder of her mother’s legacy that falling in love can hurt you in more ways than one. But when one of her clients is murdered, Emma comes face to face with a detective who makes her question her resolve to remain safely unattached. Reeling from her wife’s death, Nick Tanner fled her life as a homicide detective in the big city. But when a brutal murder rocks the police department in sleepy Battle Creek, she isn’t prepared for the haunting memories, or complications, it brings - especially stubborn therapist Emma, who is determined to solve the case all by herself if she has to. But when Emma becomes the target for a killer, both their lives - and the love building between them - are put in danger. Is it better to love with the risk of losing, or not love at all?

Olivia's Awakening


Ronica Black - 2020
    One morning, after struggling to run up a mountain trail, she meets Eve Monroe who stirs her in ways she doesn’t understand.Eve helps women achieve the physical fitness they yearn for, but when it comes to her love life, she buries her own yearnings and only dates casually. All that changes the day she meets the beautiful and sheltered Olivia. Eve is surprisingly smitten, and she soon finds that her desire to help is quickly overshadowed by her desire to make love.When Olivia hires Eve as her trainer, their attempts at controlling their attraction are no match for their unbridled passion. But it’s the deeper, more poignant feelings neither of them can ignore that have Olivia and Eve questioning everything they’ve ever known about love.Cover Artist: Tammy SeidickGenres: Contemporary / Romance Tags: Coming Out, Friends to Lovers Romance, Virgins/First Love

Idaho Code


Joan Opyr - 2006
    Especially when murder and homophobia are stalking the streets. For Wilhelmina “Bil” Hardy, trapped in the coils of her eccentric family and off-the-wall friends, neither the course of true love nor amateur sleuthing runs smooth. Mistaken identity, misunderstandings, and mysteries galore take Bil to places she’s never dreamed of visiting.Idaho Code is a funny book about love, family, and the freedom you can find in a state that values individuality more than common sense.Joan Opyr’s hobbies are politics, politics, and politics, though, for the sake of variation, she has been known occasionally to dance the polka.

Elena Undone


Nicole Conn - 2011
    A wife who will not question her loyalty to a husband she does not love nor her duty to a church whose tenets she does not fully accept.Peyton. A lesbian trapped in an arid relationship and a life that has brought her success but scant emotional sustenance.Their eyes first meet across the distance of a public park. One glance is all it takes for ignition. A slow-building sexual fire soon becomes a conflagration that engulfs both their lives.But no matter how compelling the attraction, no matter how intensely love may reach into the depths of either of their souls, reality is inflexible. Elena’s husband is pastor of a church; her son is the center of her life; and she is haunted by a burden of grief and guilt that fixes her firmly in the conventional life she leads.From Nicole Conn, novelist and multi-award-winning director of little man, writer-director of the legendary lesbian film Claire of the Moon, comes this powerful love story--a luminously romantic film as evocative as it is erotic (and already famous for its Longest Kiss in Cinema History)—and now a novel that reveals every moment of Elena’s unforgettable journey.

Desert of the Heart


Jane Rule - 1964
    This classic of lesbian eroticism is Jane Rule's first novel.Set in the late 1950s, this is the story of Evelyn Hall, an English professor, who goes to Reno to obtain a divorce and put an end to her disastrous 16-year marriage. While staying at a boarding house to establish her six-week residency requirement she meets Ann Childs, a casino worker and fifteen years her junior. Physically, they are remarkably alike and eventually have an affair and begin the struggle to figure out just how a relationship between two women can last. Desert of the Heart examines the conflict between convention and freedom and the ways in which the characters try to resolve the conflict.

Come and Get Me


Julie Cannon - 2007
    Laura Collier doesn't fit the mold and Elliot knows she should walk away. Instead she finds herself in the unusual position of pursuing another woman.

Wind and Sea


C.L. Ryder - 2018
    Not in high school, not in art school, and not since she’d gotten her work into major galleries across the country. It’s not that she doesn’t want it—she’s just never found the right woman—until a trip to the beach put her right onto Cammy’s canvas. The mysterious surfer in red. She’s charming and sexy, and Cammy can’t get her out of her mind… but there’s only one problem: The girl is 100% undeniably straight. Lei Castle is a real free spirit. She’s traveled the world with only her surfboard, and now she’s finally back home in the California. With her van set up on the beach, her only worry is how the waves are going to be that day. When Cammy shows up at her private cove the two are drawn into a close friendship, and Lei takes it upon herself to show the risk-averse painter how to have a little excitement. As Cammy falls deeper in love with her friend, it becomes harder and harder to keep her tremendous desires a secret. Will she suffer the pain of unrequited love for as long as they’re together? How can the tides of fate make an impossible love a reality?

Pursuing Pandora


Maggie Brown - 2020
    Poking her nose into her cousin’s love life is the last thing she wants to do. So what if he has a giant crush on Pandora, a lounge singer thirteen years his senior? The cougar just might teach him a thing or two.For Pandora, the sultry siren with the slinky low-cut gown façade is all an act. It’s showbiz. She dislikes the adulation and the numerous advances, especially from the Russian gangster and the aging playboy. Besides, she has an ulterior motive for being at the club, and romance is definitely off the agenda.But uptight, reserved Winter is a complication she hasn’t foreseen. And even with the best intentions, love has a way of striking at the most inopportune times.

Landing


Emma Donoghue - 2007
    Síle is a stylish citizen of the new Dublin, a veteran flight attendant who's traveled the world. Jude is a twenty-five-year-old archivist, stubbornly attached to the tiny town of Ireland, Ontario, in which she was born and raised. On her first plane trip, Jude's and Síle's worlds touch and snag at Heathrow Airport. In the course of the next year, their lives, and those of their friends and families, will be drawn into a new, shaky orbit. This sparkling, lively story explores age-old questions: Does where you live matter more than who you live with? What would you give up for love, and would you be a fool to do so?

Silver Kiss


Naomi Clark - 2010
    Ayla Hammond has come home.After years as a lone wolf in a self-imposed exile she’s rejoining the pack and trying to mend fences with her parents.She’s convinced them to accept her girlfriend, but can a lone wolf change her ways?As if homecoming wasn’t hard enough, Ayla also can’t help getting involved in a missing person case.With pressure to solve the case mounting from the pack alphas, Ayla is starting to question where her loyalties lie – and if a return to the pack she left behind is really what she wants.

Keeping Long Island


Courtney Peppernell - 2017
    And while she's always been a good listener, she's never been good at sharing. At the suggestion of her therapist, she finds a safe place for her secrets between the pages of a daily journal. Just when Kayden thinks things are finally back on track, her life takes an unexpected turn - a mysterious letter from someone named Alex.Courtney Peppernell, the best-selling author of Pillow Thoughts, brings a world of intrigue, exploration, and the struggle for identity to life in Keeping Long Island. Kayden must make a choice - is she brave enough to share her secrets with Alex, or will the weight of her fears destroy everything she has been fighting for?

Game Night


Cassidy Storm - 2019
    . . Alyssa has crushed on her client, Mia, for months. So, when Mia invites Alyssa over for an all-girls’ “game night,” she’s all-in. But Alyssa quickly finds the stakes are much higher than she anticipated when she learns the name of the game is poker -- strip poker. Alyssa must up her ante when she realizes she faces stiff competition -- and that there's much more to lose than clothing…

Trial by Fury


K.G. MacGregor - 2016
    Threatened with her job if she goes public, Celia pays a secret visit to celebrated women’s rights attorney Theodora Constantine. Theo’s riding high after winning a very public sexual harassment claim against a cable news network. Next up for her firm is a class action suit that will strain her small staff. She can’t afford to get sidetracked by another case, but Celia won’t take no for an answer. The case is compelling and so is Celia—so much that Theo finds herself falling hard. But before they can win love, they have to win justice.

Valencia


Michelle Tea - 2000
    Through a string of narrative moments, Tea records a year lived in a world of girls: there's knife-wielding Marta, who introduces Michelle to a new world of radical sex; Willa, Michelle's tormented poet-girlfriend; Iris, the beautiful boy-dyke who ran away from the South in a dust cloud of drama; and Iris's ex, Magdalena Squalor, to whom Michelle turns when Iris breaks her heart. Valencia conveys a blend of youthful urgency and apocalyptic apathy.

Far from Xanadu


Julie Anne Peters - 2005
    In this fresh, poignant novel Mike is struggling to come to terms with her father's suicide and her mother's detachment from her family. Mike (real name Mary Elizabeth) is gay and likes to pump iron, play softball and fix plumbing. When a glamorous new girl, Xanadu, arrives in Mike's small Kansas town, she falls in love at first sight. Xanadu is everything that Mike is not - cool, confident, feminine, sexy and - straight! No matter how close their growing friendship is, Mike is always going to be 'far from Xanadu'.Following the success of Luna, Julie Ann Peters' has written a heartbreaking, yet ultimately hopeful, novel which will speak to anyone who has ever fallen in love with someone who can't love them back