Name Me Nobody


Lois-Ann Yamanaka - 1999
    Yamanaka pens powerful novel of friendship, family, sexuality, and identity in which 13-year-old Emi-Lou struggles with coming of age and middle school in Hawaii.

The Sea of Light


Jenifer Levin - 1993
    Angelita is the hurricane that brings down a plane carrying a team of star-quality swimmers, groomed from childhood to compete at the international level. Babe Delgado is a young Cuban-American woman, presumed dead, who is rescued from the crash. Fifty-one hours in the Atlantic have left her scarred in body and spirit, afraid to compete again. Brenna Allen is a tough, driven swim coach at a small university, grieving for a lover lost to cancer. She finds solace in building her own winning team, driving her overworked captain, Ellie Marks, ever harder. Ellie is a child of holocaust survivors, struggling to own herself and her sexuality as hard as she's working to win. Brenna recruits Babe, promising to help her rebuild her damaged body, strength, and will. The Sea of Light is a story of wins, losses, and passions in a world where destiny and magic interfere with victory, where families are forced to reconcile with private hurts and false dreams, and where a redemptive, healing love between women - erotic and overwhelmingly intimate - stands in stark contrast to the expectations of the world. A sensitive, powerful tale of self-discovery, sexual identity, and violent emotions unleashed by sudden disaster, this novel is sure to command attention and acclaim.

Mission: Girlfriend


Marian Snowe - 2020
    Two single women. One meddling family. Is it a recipe for love or disaster?Jas Arsenault won’t let a bad breakup ruin her Christmas. Her heart aches for someone to spend the holiday with, but time with her family will have to be enough. But they’ve made it their mission to find her a girlfriend, and they won’t stop until she has one...no matter how much she protests.Chloe Simmons has always been alone, and this year will be no different. Snowbound at a ski resort with total strangers must be better than spending the holiday by herself, right? When she and Jas meet unexpectedly in the resort’s only working hot tub, both women are shocked by the intensity of their connection. Could this be exactly what they need?Too bad Jas’s family has other ideas...“Mission: Girlfriend” is a lighthearted, romantic holiday short story by best-selling author Marian Snowe.

Milk Teeth


Amrita Mahale - 2018
    A meeting is in progress to decide the fate of the establishment and its residents. And the zeitgeist of the 1990s appears to have touched everyone and everything around them.Ira is now a journalist on the civic beat, unearthing stories of corruption and indolence, and trying to push back memories of a lost love. Kartik works a corporate job with an MNC, and leads a secret, agonising, exhilarating second life. Between and around them throbs the living, beating heart of Mumbai, city of heaving inequities and limitless dreams.Milk Teeth is subtle, incisive, unputdownable.

Bread Givers


Anzia Yezierska - 1925
    Sarah's struggle towards independence and self-fulfillment resonates with a passion all can share. Beautifully redesigned page for page with the previous editions, Bread Givers is an essential historical work with enduring relevance.

My Lovely Frankie


Judith Clarke - 2017
    And when he spoke the word "love", it seemed to spring free and fly into the air like a beautiful balloon you wanted to run after. But I couldn't tell my parents about Frankie, not properly. I told them I'd made friends with the boy in the room next to mine, and how he'd come from this little town out west. I couldn't tell them how he was becoming the best thing in my world. I couldn't tell anyone, I hardly admitted it to myself.'In the 1950s, 'entering' the seminary was for ever, and young boys were gathered into the priesthood before they were old enough to know what they would lose. Tom went to St Finbar's because he was looking for something more than the ordinary happiness of his home and school.But then he discovered that being able to love another person was the most important thing of all. For Tom, loving Frankie made him part of the world. Even when Frankie was gone...

Be My Love


Kit Pearson - 2019
    She and her beloved cousin Una run wild, and Maisie feels the warm embrace of her big, extended family.This summer Maisie needs that escape more than ever. But now everything on Kingfisher has changed: Una has returned from her mainland school a sophisticated young woman too mature for childish games, and even worse, she has an all-consuming infatuation with David Meyer, both an old friend and an older man. Soon Maisie finds herself playing second fiddle—jealous of Una and David’s closeness, and unsure of what those feelings mean.When Maisie’s greatest attempt to maintain the special magic of her friendship with Una goes up in smoke, it seems as though all is lost. But with an enormous revelation, and a heartrending intervention, Maisie may finally discover the strength she needs to find the same peace that the island has brought her within herself.

Capsized


Julie Cannon - 2016
    Bert struggles to succeed with the whims of Mother Nature. Alissa owns a successful advertising agency and is the epitome of high class and high fashion. When Alissa volunteers to help on the boat, Bert is more than a little surprised at how well she does.The attraction between them grows, and one stormy night their pent-up desires crash together like the waves against the ship. When the ship returns to port, both women realize their lives are too different for anything other than their brief affair. They are simply too different. Their families are too different. Their lives too different. Then why do they keep coming back to each other?

Eat Your Heart Out


Dayna Ingram - 2011
    Then the strip-mall calm of Nowhere, Ohio, is shattered by the sudden, simultaneous appearance of Renni Ramirez—hyper-competent star of the beloved Rising Evil B-movie franchise—and actual ZOMBIES, leaving Ashbee’s hapless staff and Renni trapped behind an automatic door they can’t lock.Can failed creative-writing student/apprentice store manager/eagle-eyed markswoman Devin escape the besieged furniture store to rescue her girlfriend? Will Renni’s experience slaughtering motion-captured CGI monsters save the day before the army bombs the town? Once bitten, how many zombies can a person expect to take out before succumbing to infection? Who is the mysterious Deus Ex Machina, and what is he doing with that bone saw?All of these questions and more whisper behind the scream of the single most important thing Devin needs to know in order to survive: is Renni a top or a bottom?

Cinnamon Gardens


Shyam Selvadurai - 1998
    A young teacher, Annalukshmi, whose splintered family attempts to arrange an appropriate marriage for her, must decide whether the independence she craves will doom her to a life without love and companionship.It is also the story of Balendran who, respectably married, must suppress-or confront-the secret desires for men that threaten to throw his life into chaos. With sensuous atmosphere and vivid prose, this masterfully plotted novel re-creates a world where a beautiful veneer of fragrant gardens and manners hides social, personal, and political issues still relevant today.

Leash


Jane DeLynn - 2002
    While her current spends the summer researching public housing in Stockholm, a moderately wealthy, object-oppressed, and terminally hip New York female of a certain age seeks adventure in the sedate dyke bars of lower Manhattan. Finding none, she answers a personal ad. She is ordered to put on a blindfold before the first meeting with the woman she knows only as Sir. Not knowing what someone looks like turns out to be freeing, as do the escalating constraints that alienate her not just from her former life, but from her very conception of who she is. Part Georges Bataille, part Fran Leibowitz, this is the Story of O told with a self-referentially perverse sense of humor. Leash extends the logic of S&M to its inexorable and startling conclusion, darkly and hilariously revealing the masochistic impulse as the urge to disappear from the chores, obligations, and emotional vacuity of daily life. First published in 2002.

Juniper Lane


Dylan Morrison - 2016
    She certainly didn't expect to find herself striking up a strange, unexpected friendship with the intimidating Nadia Bahjat, the only other twenty-something on the street. But now that she's here, Mim thinks she might just do anything to stay – no matter the cost.Meanwhile, Nadia, a professional chef and a perennial disappointment to her parents, has been forced by her father's illness to return to Barn Ridge, Ohio. Though she loathes her wealthy, seemingly perfect neighbors as much as she always has, she's increasingly finding her growing friendship with Mim a balm to heal old wounds. But the longer she stays on Juniper Lane, the more she begins to suspect that when it comes to her family, not all is as it seems.An innovatively structured queer romance that encompasses both a cutting satire of suburban American life and a nuanced depiction of the psychological aftermath of abuse, Juniper Lane is a moving paean to the freedom of embracing the chaotic uncertainty of adulthood.

My Invented Life


Lauren Bjorkman - 2009
    Still, they're as close as sisters can be. Until Eva deletes Roz from her life like so much junk e-mail for no reason that Roz understands. Now Eva hangs out with the annoyingly petite cheerleaders, and Roz fantasizes about slipping bovine growth hormone into their Gatorade.Roz has a suspicion about Eva. In turn, Eva taunts Roz with a dare, which leads to an act of total insanity. Drama geeks clamor for attention, Shakespearean insults fly, and Roz steals the show in Lauren Bjorkman's hilarious debut novel.

A Little Life


Hanya Yanagihara - 2015
    There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome—but that will define his life forever.

Whiskey When We're Dry


John Larison - 2018
    Desperate to fend off starvation and predatory neighbors, she cuts off her hair, binds her chest, saddles her beloved mare, and sets off across the mountains to find her outlaw brother Noah and bring him home. A talented sharpshooter herself, Jess's quest lands her in the employ of the territory's violent, capricious Governor, whose militia is also hunting Noah—dead or alive.Wrestling with her brother's outlaw identity, and haunted by questions about her own, Jess must outmaneuver those who underestimate her, ultimately rising to become a hero in her own right.Told in Jess's wholly original and unforgettable voice, Whiskey When We're Dry is a stunning achievement, an epic as expansive as America itself—and a reckoning with the myths that are entwined with our history.