I’ve read a lot of contemporary romances featuring LGBTQIA characters, but I wanted to delve a little deeper into both the LGBTQIA genre as well as the time period this Pride Month, and I discovered some really fantastic LGBTQIA historical fiction!
Last Night at the Telegraph Club by Malinda Lo
It’s 1954 San Francisco, and 17-year-old Lily Hu is the epitome of a “good Chinese girl”: She’s modest, respectful of her parents, and her most outlandish interest is rocket science. Then she finds a magazine ad for Tommy Andrews, male impersonator at the Telegraph Club, and everything changes. She befriends classmate Kathleen Miller, who’s into airplanes and knows about the Telegraph Club too, and all of her unspoken feelings begin tumbling out. The pair sneak out to the club, and Lily is both overwhelmed and thrilled as she is enveloped by the San Francisco lesbian scene. But the girls’ secret is dangerous; it threatens Lily’s oldest friendships and even her father’s citizenship status. Eventually, Lily must decide if owning her truth is worth everything she’s ever known. In the background of Lily’s exploration of her identity, Red Scare paranoia is rising, and deportation is a threat to everyone around. This is a richly researched novel that really brings 1950s Chinatown to life.
The Half Life of Valery K by Natasha Pulley
The year is 1963, and Dr. Valery Kolkhanov, a nuclear scientist, is moved from his frozen Siberian prison to City 40. There he’s expected to serve out the remainder of his prison term by studying radiation and its effect on the local wildlife. But as Valery begins his work, he is struck by the questions his research raises: why is there so much radiation in this area? What, exactly, is being hidden from the thousands who live in the town? And if he keeps looking for answers, will he live to serve out his sentence? Valery’s every move is monitored by KGB agent Konstantin Shenkov, an enigmatic man who becomes an unlikely ally. As Valery uncovers more secrets surrounding City 40, he and Shenkov find themselves drawn together in a forbidden attraction. Based on the Kyshtym nuclear disaster of 1957, The Half Life of Valery K is a compelling window into a terrifying and lesser-known aspect of the Cold War. With unexpected twists, a paranoid atmosphere and a fascinating narrator, this novel is a superb work of historical fiction as well as an excellent mystery.
Mademoiselle Revolution by Zoe Sivak
Sylvie de Rosiers, the biracial daughter of a rich planter in 1791 Saint-Domingue, is both a lady born to privilege and a reminder of her father’s infidelity with an enslaved woman. After a violent slave uprising begins the Haitian Revolution, Sylvie and her brother leave their parents and old lives behind to flee unwittingly into another uprising—austere and radical Paris. Sylvie quickly becomes enamored with the aims of the Revolution, as well as with the revolutionaries themselves—most notably Maximilien Robespierre and his mistress, Cornélie Duplay. As a rising leader and abolitionist, Robespierre sees an opportunity to exploit Sylvie’s race and abandonment of her aristocratic roots as an example of his ideals, while the strong-willed Cornélie offers Sylvie guidance in free thought and a safe harbor. Sylvie battles with her past complicity in a slave society and her future within this new world order as she finds herself increasingly tugged between Robespierre’s ideology and Cornélie’s love. When the Reign of Terror descends, she must decide whether to become an accomplice while another kingdom rises on the bones of innocents…or risk losing her head.
Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue
In 1805, fourteen-year-old Eliza Raine is a school girl at the Manor School for Young Ladies in York. The daughter of an Indian mother and a British father, Eliza was banished to this unfamiliar country as a little girl. When she first stepped off the King George in Kent, Eliza was accompanied by her older sister, Jane, but now she boards alone at the Manor, with no one left to claim her. She spends her days avoiding the attention of her fellow pupils until, one day, a fearless and charismatic new student arrives at the school, Anne Lister. The two girls are immediately thrown together and soon Eliza’s life is turned inside out by this strange and curious young woman. This is a brilliantly researched historical novel, based on the lives of two real women. Not much is known about Eliza other than she was Lister’s first love. But on the flipside, quite a bit is known about Lister, as she was a prolific diarist and much of what she wrote has been recovered. And it’s through her diaries, along with a small number of letters written by Raine, that Donoghue has pieced their story together.
