The Cottage


Caroline Jimenez - 2017
    With plans for renovations dancing in her head, she looks forward to breathing life into her old cottage by the beach and most importantly, herself. Not used to being on her own, she sets out on a new chapter of her life hoping to find friends and happiness. Inspired by some of her favorite books, Nadia discovers adventures are just a wine bottle away, but it's the friendship forming in her neighbor, Laine Montgomery, that has Nadia grateful for the move. With a bit of good-natured Southern meddling from Laine's best friend, Susannah, could more than friendship be on the horizon between Nadia and Laine?

Awakening to Sunlight


Lindsey Stone - 2010
    Lizzy Mayfield, a filmmaker who lost her lover three years ago, comes home from a business trip to find Judith and her child unexpectedly living in her apartment.Lizzy wants nothing more than to be left alone, but as Judith has nowhere else to go, Lizzy allows her to stay. While Judith struggles to create a new life for her daughter and herself, Lizzy is confronted with the vibrancy their presence brings to her emotionally barren existence. As Lizzy and Judith gradually become involved in each other’s lives, they are both forced to confront the ghosts of their pasts.

Love Lessons


Heidi Cullinan - 2013
    But when he arrives at Hope University, he quickly realizes finding his Prince Charming isn’t so easy. Everyone here is already out. In fact, Kelly could be the only virgin on campus.Worst of all, he’s landed the charming, handsome, gay campus Casanova as a roommate, whose bed might as well be equipped with a revolving door.Walter Lucas doesn’t believe in storybook love. Everyone is better off having as much fun as possible with as many people as possible…except his shy, sad little sack of a roommate is seriously screwing up his world view.As Walter sets out to lure Kelly out of his shell, staying just friends is harder than he anticipated. He discovers love is a crash course in determination. To make the grade, he’ll have to finally show up for class…and overcome his own private fear that love was never meant to last.Warning: This story contains lingering glances, milder than usual sexual content for this author, and a steamy dance-floor kiss. Story has no dairy or egg content, but may contain almonds.

An Infatuation


Jennifer Lyndon - 2013
    A successful realtor in Aspen, Lise is married to her high school sweetheart and is the mother of two great kids, Michael and Candace. To her two closest friends, Kitty and Cheryl, Lise's life appears ideal, until her husband Scott is passed over for the partnership in the architectural firm where he works. At the party to welcome her husband's new boss, a woman she's determined to despise, Lise meets Juliana Rhodes. The attraction is immediate and unsettling for Lise, sending her perfectly balanced life into a tailspin.

Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit


Jeanette Winterson - 1985
    Zealous and passionate, she seems destined for life as a missionary, but then she falls for one of her converts.At sixteen, Jeanette decides to leave the church, her home and her family, for the young woman she loves. Innovative, punchy and tender,Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is a few days ride into the bizarre outposts of religious excess and human obsession.

Rainey Days


R.E. Bradshaw - 2010
    She drinks too much and hasn't had a good night's sleep in months. On a hung-over morning, in June, Rainey finds herself thrust back into the world of stalkers, rapist and serial killers by a request for help, from an old friend. The next thirteen days will change Rainey's life forever, if she survives. On top of all that, Katie, her friend's wife, the one she is supposed to protect, brings out feelings Rainey didn't know she had. Though Katie is married and neither she nor Rainey has ever been in a lesbian relationship, the two women are thrown together by a bizarre series of events, learning to depend on each other for survival.

Tipping the Velvet


Sarah Waters - 1998
    Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-hall stars in an all-singing and dancing double act. At the same time, behind closed doors, they admit their attraction to each other and their affair begins.

Tricky Wisdom: Year I


Camryn Eyde - 2015
    Leaving her small northeast Minnesota town for Harvard in a quest to become a doctor, she moves in with med-student Olivia Boyd, a neurotic, anal, gigantic pain in the backside. The first year of juggling medical school is gruelling, but it’s nothing compared to living with Olivia.Coming out to her friends and family with an anti-climactic flop, Darcy uses her newly publicised sexuality to try and win Taylor’s affections through an ill-hatched scheme that crosses uncomfortable lines. The result is as unexpected to Darcy as Darcy’s affinity for medicine is to Olivia.The first year of medical school is a nerve-wracking encounter in medicine, learning lessons the hard way, and finding what her heart desires.*Minor changes to manuscript updated 2nd September*48,900 words

Cast Me Gently


Caren J. Werlinger - 2015
    Teresa still lives at home. As much as she loves her boisterous Italian family, she feels trapped by them and their plans for her life. Their love is suffocating her. Ellie has been on her own for years, working hard to save up enough to live her dream of escaping from Pittsburgh to travel the world. Except leaving isn’t that simple when she knows her brother is out on the streets of the city somewhere, back from Vietnam, but not home. When Teresa and Ellie meet and fall in love, their worlds clash. Ellie would love to be part of Teresa’s family, but they both know that will never happen. Sooner or later, Teresa will have to choose between the two halves of her heart—Ellie or her family. Set in 1980, the beginning of the Reagan era and the decline of Pittsburgh’s steel empire, Cast Me Gently is a classic lesbian romance. Words: 100,510

Cassandra at the Wedding


Dorothy Baker - 1962
    At the beginning of this novel, she drives back to her family ranch in the foothills of the Sierras to attend the wedding of her identical twin, Judith, to a nice young doctor from Connecticut. Cassandra, however, is hell-bent on sabotaging the wedding. Dorothy Baker's entrancing tragicomic novella follows an unpredictable course of events in which her heroine appears variously as conniving, self-aware, pitiful, frenzied, absurd, and heartbroken—at once utterly impossible and tremendously sympathetic. Cassandra reckons with her complicated feelings about the sister who she feels owes it to her to be her alter ego; with her father, a brandy-soaked retired professor of philosophy; and with the ghost of her dead mother, as she struggles to come to terms with the only life she has. First published in 1962, Cassandra at the Wedding is a book of enduring freshness, insight, and verve. Like the fiction of Jeffrey Eugenides and Jhumpa Lahiri, it is the work of a master stylist with a profound understanding of the complexities of the heart and mind.

Finding My Way


Mavis Applewater - 2015
    Dr. Stephanie Grant has carefully planned out her life. After accepting a position at Prower University she quickly learns that life doesn't follow a plan. After meeting Allison Kendell she begins to question if she has ever been happy. Suddenly her well planned life is spiraling out of control.

Orphan Number Eight


Kim van Alkemade - 2015
    When tragedy strikes, Rachel is separated from her brother Sam and sent to a Jewish orphanage where Dr. Mildred Solomon is conducting medical research. Subjected to X-ray treatments that leave her disfigured, Rachel suffers years of cruel harassment from the other orphans. But when she turns fifteen, she runs away to Colorado hoping to find the brother she lost and discovers a family she never knew she had.Though Rachel believes she’s shut out her painful childhood memories, years later she is confronted with her dark past when she becomes a nurse at Manhattan’s Old Hebrews Home and her patient is none other than the elderly, cancer-stricken Dr. Solomon. Rachel becomes obsessed with making Dr. Solomon acknowledge, and pay for, her wrongdoing. But each passing hour Rachel spends with the old doctor reveal to Rachel the complexities of her own nature. She realizes that a person’s fate—to be one who inflicts harm or one who heals—is not always set in stone.Lush in historical detail, rich in atmosphere and based on true events, Orphan #8 is a powerful, affecting novel of the unexpected choices we are compelled to make that can shape our destinies.

The Rules of Attraction


Bret Easton Ellis - 1987
    Bret Easton Ellis trains his incisive gaze on the kids at self-consciously bohemian Camden College and treats their sexual posturings and agonies with a mixture of acrid hilarity and compassion while exposing the moral vacuum at the center of their lives. The Rules of Attraction is a poignant, hilarious take on the death of romance.

Where Are You


Bella Donnis - 2014
    When the beautiful yet chronically shy Erin begins her degree at the University of Cambridge, she finds herself unable cope with the pressure. Just as she decides to run and destroy her future career prospects, a chance encounter with the confident, warm, caring, eccentric and stunning Gianna, a foreign student from Napoli, Italy changes everything.Just as their friendship reaches a peak and Erin has changed into a new person, Gianna mysteriously disappears, sending Erin back into a negative spiral of loss.Ten years later, after a sudden and strange twist of fate, Erin decides to seek out the only true friend she ever had, in the hope of rekindling where they left off many years before.Where Are You is a story of forbidden love, friendship and redemption set amidst the magnificent regal beauty of Cambridge, England as well as the ancient Italian cities of Napoli and Pompeii.

No More Pretending


Bette Hawkins - 2017
    She's so good at pretending, in fact, that no one watching her popular rom-coms or dazzling red carpet appearances would assume she was anything but charming, outgoing...and straight. While preparing to shoot a new film in a small Texas town, Lauren wonders what she would be like if her own life had followed a different script. Then she meets Harper Ward, a waitress at the local diner, whose natural beauty leaves her speechless. Harper mistakes Lauren's reaction for being stuck up and takes an instant dislike to her. Like Lauren, Harper isn't exactly what she seems—and also wonders what her life would be like if family obligations hadn't turned her world upside down. When the film's lecherous director hires Harper to work as his assistant, she and Lauren find themselves fighting a powerful attraction that quickly escalates into an overwhelming passion. But where can they go from here?