Calling all romantics and yearning hearts! Ready to sink your teeth into stories steeped in longing and unexpected love? We’ve handpicked these queer romances just for you – tales that celebrate the enduring beauty, complexity and surprise of connection. From aching desire in the Welsh valleys and reckoning with love in postwar Netherlands to coming-of-age awakenings in Nigeria, these stories promise to move and captivate. Read on to find your perfect match...
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
The Safekeep opens in postwar Netherlands, and grapples with the country’s inability to acknowledge the fate of Dutch Jews. It doesn’t sound like it’s going to shape up to be a sexy, sapphic story, but seriously, wait for it. Tension builds when Isabel, the protective caretaker of the stately home she grew up in, is left with a guest against her will – her womanising brother’s frivolous girlfriend, Eva. As Isabel contends with the girl-shaped disruption to her meticulous routine and family history, so unfolds a violent sexual awakening – and a gorgeous, intimate love story.
A Room Above a Shop by Anthony Shapland
Let’s hear it for queer Welsh representation. Author Anthony Shapland is the co-founder of g39, an artist space in Cardiff, and he beautifully blends art and fiction to find words capable of expressing the rush of clandestine love and desire, but also fear, between two men. Set in 1980s South Wales against the backdrop of Section 28, the age of consent debate and the AIDS crisis, this sparse novella follows M and B, who begin a life together above an ironmonger’s, finding solace in each other as the outside world threatens to encroach on their haven. A lyrical and quietly devastating debut.
In Memoriam by Alice Winn
It’s 1914 and Henry Gaunt and Sidney Ellwood are close school friends – both nursing all-consuming crushes for the other, and in torturous denial. Meanwhile, the violence of war seems far away from their quaint English boarding school. When Gaunt, half-German, enlists to preserve his family’s reputation and flee his feelings for his best friend, Ellwood soon follows. Forced to confront both their forbidden feelings and the horrors of the front, the boys are locked in an unimaginably desperate situation. It’s Atonement meets Call Me By Your Name, and you’ll be a wreck after this visceral, heartbreaking epic.
The Edges by Angelo Tijssens
A man revisits his rundown seaside hometown to clear out the house of his recently deceased mother. While recounting this abusive mother-son relationship, he is drawn to a past lover from his youth – the one he seems to have never truly moved on from. This novella, translated from Dutch, aches with longing and confused yearning – for a complicated past long gone, and an impossible future. It’s spare, short and romantic.
Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
This mesmerising tale takes place in the young republic of Nigeria as the Biafran civil war rages. Ijeoma is our narrator, a young girl who comes of age at the same time as her country. Sent away from her family to relative safety, she meets another young girl, Amina, from a different ethnic group. They tentatively fall in love, in a highly religious and conservative society that forbids their connection. An enduring, powerful tale of love, courage, and queer identity in Nigeria, to be returned to time and time again.
