Books

Amba is a fashion and travel writer and a 1920s “New Woman” — she flouts the mores, climbs the barriers, makes some deeply questionable choices, and loves a woman named Ida against the whole grain of her age. Then she dies in a mid-air collision.

Seventy years on, her brother Andrew hires a young research librarian, Frasey, to put Amba’s archive in order, and Amba proceeds to take over Frasey’s life as thoroughly as she took over her own. Stephanie Shields writes it joyous and dark by turns, with a full-circle ending readers keep singling out.

Why it’s here: Amba is a woman whose whole life gets weighed only after it ends — by the people left holding her papers, seventy years on. It is a novel about who gets to decide what a woman’s life meant, which is a question that arrives for all of us eventually.

Regina, 89, and Jackie, 90, together for six decades, get through one winter day in 2017, with memories reaching back to a 1955 bar raid. A novel about long love, old age and a lesbian couple’s shared history.

Bernardine Evaristo’s Booker Prize–winning novel follows twelve characters — mostly Black British women, spanning generations from a teenager to a woman in her nineties — whose lives interweave across a century and the length of Britain, from Newcastle to Cornwall. Each is chasing something: a shared past, an unexpected future, a place to belong, a lost mother or father, a touch of hope. Told in Evaristo’s fluid, near-verse style, it is a portrait of British womanhood as it has rarely been written.

Hilary Stevens, a poet in her seventies, submits to a day of interviews and ends up reviewing an entire life: the marriage, the women she loved, and where the poems came from. This is the novel in which Sarton wrote openly about lesbian love, at genuine professional cost to herself.

Mary Caine, nearly sixty, still hopes each year that the mother who abandoned her will return with the Midsummer Carnival. Instead it is Sadie Barnes, the first love who left town thirty years ago, who may be coming back. A later-in-life lesbian romance.

Vivienne Underwood disguises herself as a man to fight alongside Henry V and returns from Agincourt a seasoned warrior. Joan of Arc charges her to use her powers for women, not crown or country, sending the vampire swordswoman through centuries of war, witch burnings, and progress for women. A queer historical vampire novel for readers who believe women grow more powerful with age.

Shunned as a medieval healer and rescued by a vampire, Marion Chase joins a sisterhood devoted to ethical living. Five centuries later she runs a Chicago blood bank with a hidden sideline — until she falls for the one person who could destroy her.