This month we're taking a look at queer historical fiction. From sapphic Georgian romances to gay retellings of The Great Gatsby and a neo-Victorian queer farce, here are 12 LGBTQ+ historical fiction books that everyone should read:

Infamous - Lex Croucher

Reading age: 18+

22-year-old aspiring writer Edith 'Eddie' Miller and her best friend Rose have always done everything together - climbing trees, throwing grapes at boys, sneaking bottles of wine, practicing kissing... But following their debutante ball Rose is suddenly talking about marriage, and Eddie is horrified. When Eddie meets charming, renowned poet Nash Nicholson, he invites her to his crumbling Gothic estate in the countryside. The entourage of eccentric artists indulging in pure hedonism is exactly what Eddie needs in order to forget Rose and finish her novel. But Eddie might discover the world of famous literary icons isn't all poems and pleasure. Booksmart meets Bridgerton in this sapphic historical fiction romance.

Nettleblack - Nat Reeve

Reading age: 18+

1893. Henry Nettleblack has to act fast or she'll be married off by her elder sister. But leaving the safety of her wealthy life isn't as simple as she thought.

Ambushed, robbed, and then saved by a mysterious organisation - part detective agency, part neighbourhood watch - a desperate Henry disguises herself and enlists. Sent out to investigate a string of crimes, she soon realises that she is living in a small rural town with surprisingly big problems. When the net starts to close around Henry, and sinister forces threaten to expose her as the missing Nettleblack sister, the new people in her life seem to offer her a way out, and a way forward.

Is the world she's lost in also a place she can find herself? Told through journal entries and letters, Nettleblack is a subversive and playful ride through the perils and joys of finding your place in the world, challenging myths about queerness - particularly transness - as a modern phenomenon, while exploring the practicalities of articulating queer perspectives when you're struggling for words.

Murder Under Her Skin - Stephen Spotswood

Reading age: 18+

Someone's put a blade in the back of the Amazing Tattooed Woman, and Willowjean "Will" Parker's former knife-throwing mentor has been stitched up for the crime. To uncover the truth, Will and her boss, world-famous detective Lillian Pentecost, travel south into a snakepit of old grudges, small-town crime, and secrets worth killing for. New York, 1946: The last time Will Parker let a case get personal, she walked away with a broken face, a bruised ego, and the solemn promise never again to let her heart get in the way of her job. But she called Hart and Halloway's Travelling Circus and Sideshow home for five years, and Ruby Donner, the circus's tattooed ingenue, was her friend. To make matters worse the prime suspect is Valentin Kalishenko, the man who taught Will everything she knows about putting a knife where it needs to go. To uncover the real killer and keep Kalishenko from a date with the electric chair, Will and Ms. Pentecost join the circus in sleepy Stoppard, Virginia, where the locals like their cocktails mild, the past buried, and big-city detectives not at all.

Liebestrasse - Greg Lockard

Reading age: 18+

During the final years of the Weimar Republic, Sam meets Philip in Berlin and they fall in love.

Their romance is hit with an unspeakable reality as the Nazis come to power and fascism makes them a target.

Liebestrasse is a historical fiction graphic novel that Greg co-created with artist Tim Fish for ComiXology Originals. It was nominated as an "Outstanding Comic Book" for the 2020 GLAAD Media Awards and listed by the New York Times as one of 10 Comic Books to Celebrate Pride.

Wild and Wicked Things - Francesca May

Reading age: 18+

In the aftermath of World War I, a naive woman is swept into a glittering world filled with dark magic, romance, and murder in this lush and decadent debut.

Neither real magic nor faux magic interests Annie Mason. Not after it stole her future. She’s only on the island to settle her late father’s estate and, hopefully, reconnect with her long-absent best friend, Beatrice, who fled their dreary lives for a more glamorous one.

Yet Crow Island is brimming with temptation, and the biggest one may be her enigmatic new neighbor.

Mysterious and alluring, Emmeline Delacroix is a figure shadowed by rumors of witchcraft. And when Annie witnesses a confrontation between Bea and Emmeline at one of the island's extravagant parties, she is drawn into a glittering, haunted world. A world where the boundaries of wickedness are tested, and the cost of illicit magic might be death.

Flung Out of Space - Grace Ellis & Hannah Templer

Reading age: 18+

Flung Out of Space is both a love letter to the essential lesbian novel, The Price of Salt, and an examination of its notorious author, Patricia Highsmith. Veteran comics creators Grace Ellis and Hannah Templer have teamed up to tell this story through Highsmith’s eyes—reimagining the events that inspired her to write the story that would become a foundational piece of queer literature.

Flung Out of Space opens with Pat begrudgingly writing low-brow comics. A drinker, a smoker, and a hater of life, Pat knows she can do better. Her brain churns with images of the great novel she could and should be writing—what will eventually be Strangers on a Train— which would later be adapted into a classic film by Alfred Hitchcock in 1951.

At the same time, Pat, a lesbian consumed with self-loathing, is in and out of conversion therapy, leaving a trail of sexual conquests and broken hearts in her wake.

A Restless Truth - Freya Marske

Reading age: 18+

Magic! Murder! Shipboard romance! The second entry in Freya Marske's beloved The Last Binding trilogy, the queer historical fantasy series that began with A Marvellous Light.

The most interesting things in Maud Blyth's life have happened to her brother Robin, but she's ready to join any cause, especially if it involves magical secrets that may threaten the whole of the British Isles. Bound for New York on the R.M.S. Lyric, she's ready for an adventure.

What she actually finds is a dead body, a disrespectful parrot, and a beautiful stranger in Violet Debenham, who is everything—a magician, an actress, a scandal—Maud has been trained to fear and has learned to desire. Surrounded by the open sea and a ship full of loathsome, aristocratic suspects, they must solve a murder and untangle a conspiracy that began generations before them.

Bolla - Pajtim Statovci

Reading age: 18+

April 1995. Arsim is a 24-year-old, recently married student at the University of Pristina, in Kosovo, keeping his head down to gain a university degree in a time and place deeply hostile to Albanians. In a café he meets a young man named Miloš, a Serb. Before the day is out, everything has changed for both of them, and within a week two milestones erupt in Arsim’s married life: his wife announces her first pregnancy and he begins a life in secret.