Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast Episode 351 - On the Shelf for September 2026

Sunday, September 6, 2026 - 16:53

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Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast - Episode 351 - On the Shelf for September 2026 - Transcript

(Originally aired 2026/09/05)

Welcome to On the Shelf for September 2026.

It’s been quite a month! The first week of August I was in Orlando for the Golden Crown Literary Society conference, the last week was in Anaheim for the World Science Fiction Convention, and on top of that I started a much more intense physical therapy schedule for my broken arm that can eat up as much as 4 or 5 hours a day (though I backed off on it a little for the conferences).

This was my first time back at GCLS since 2015 and I was able to manage my expectations better and had a good time. I talked up the Project with a bunch of people, sold some books, made contacts for future interviews, and got to watch a spectacular lightning show during the outdoor welcome reception. (Outdoors, but under cover!) It’s still inescapable that the GCLS community is focused around contemporary romance and assumes that’s what people are there for, but the rest of us can fit in around the edges.

Worldcon was…well, Worldcon. It’s the home of my heart. I had lots of hanging out with old friends and new acquaintances, while entirely failing to connect with other friends. I was on 4 panels, including one on using queer history in speculative fiction. Several excellent queer-focused panels. I had a new book release for the convention—nothing queer related, however. This was The Theory of Related-ivity: A History and Analysis of the Best Related Work Hugo Category. You might have encountered an earlier version of it on my blog (if you read the blog), but now it’s out as a book with expanded data and contributions from community commentary. I’ll be looking for another data-nerd project to tackle, given how much fun I had with this one, but not in the immediate future.

The broken arm continues to mend. The physical therapy is grueling, but I’ve gotten most of my range of motion back and my grip strength is improving by leaps and bounds. Kids, try to avoid doing this at home.

I will once again remind folks that we’re doing another fiction series next year and will be open for submissions in January. Spread the word and don’t wait for the last minute to start writing. This will be the last fiction series, so don’t miss out.

News of the Field

The big book-related topic of the moment is the next phase of the Anthropic class action copyright settlement. The process for payouts to class members has kicked off and authors are dealing with reconciling conflicting claims for rights in their works. I imagine publishers are also dealing with this, but the authors are the ones sharing tips and cautions in social media. Romance author Courtney Milan has been invaluable for her detailed and knowledgeable explanations of the process, and she and Victoria Strauss of Writer Beware have provided resources for authors working through the process. There’s also a good explainer for the process on the Authors Guild website. I link several good resources in the comments, although given the timelines they will soon be obsolete.

Publications on the Blog

I took another one of my inadvertent vacations from blogging articles, though in my defense it’s only been 3 weeks since the last On the Shelf episode and one of those weeks was spent at Worldcon. I have a couple of books I’m reading on intersex topics which will be my focus this month and possibly the topic of the next podcast essay.

Book Shopping!

And although I’ve bought a fair number of books this month, none of them were non-fiction works for the Project.

Recent Lesbian/Sapphic Historical Fiction

There are a lot of new releases in lesbian and sapphic historical fiction since I last posted, so as usual I’ll be condensing the cover copy a bit in some cases. We’ll start off with a series that shows up across August and September: the Still Sisters series by Gabi Prevot set among Appalachian moonshining during Prohibition.

The Copper Line (Still Sisters #1) introduces us to the Friermuth sisters who are said to make the best liquor in the Allegheny valley. They say it quietly, because saying it loud is how a woman ends up in a photograph. Susie runs the still and keeps the recipe in her head, where nobody can subpoena it. Florence runs the truck and the room and the smile, and she is very tired of being the pretty half of an arrangement. Between them they have four years, one shotgun, one pistol, and a boss named Boyd Kessler who owns their copper and takes his cut in whatever he likes. Then a new barmaid turns up and things get complicated.

The Bitter Cut (Still Sisters #2) brings another newcomer to town—one who’s looking for the person responsible for her husband’s death from a bad batch of shine.

There are also two related short stories set several years before the first book: “The First Tin” and “The Yard Light,” exploring the sisters’ early years in business and the start of some relationships found in the books.

For the rest of the August and September books, let’s run through them in chronological order of setting, more or less. We have a small cluster of stories with classical settings and then a jump to the 18th through 20th centuries for the majority of them.

The End Crowns All by Bea Fitzgerald from Sourcebooks Fire takes us to the heart of the Trojan war.

Love caused this war. At least, that's what the stories will say. No one believes Cassandra’s visions of an alluring, lonely girl who is going to start a war. Helen fled Sparta in pursuit of love, though it's proving more elusive than she'd hoped. Her beauty and intelligence are no match for the politics of the Trojan court, especially when one princess with fiery amber eyes is determined to be rid of her. When war finally strikes, fate brings Cassandra and Helen together in ways not even the gods could have foretold. Together they will change their destinies or be the ruin of all that they love.

Locusta by Emily Dexter from Hay House LLC skips ahead to the Roman conquest of Gaul.

Locusta is the last of her kind—a Druid whose communion with the spirit world grants her the dangerous gift of identifying and wielding deadly substances. When Roman soldiers attack her home and slaughter her mother, Locusta is captured and enslaved, taken to the heart of the empire where political plots abound and death commands a high price. Her strange talents soon catch the attention of the Roman elite, and she becomes ensnared in a double life—poisoner by night for the cunning Domina Decima, and lady-in-waiting by day to Livia, the Emperor’s ambitious niece. As Locusta plants the seeds of revenge against those who destroyed her home, her connection with Livia deepens into a passionate, forbidden romance that threatens them both.

Sweet Mother, I Cannot Weave by T.D. Cloud takes its title from a poem by Sappho but appears to be set in imperial Rome as well.

Laelia Naevius is cursed by the goddess Venus: every single man her father offers her hand to dies before they can make it to the altar. She supposes she should be upset by this—the gods only know her father is—but she doesn't want to get married at all. How could she? She's too busy staring at another girl. And not just any girl—a gladiatrix. What is a girl to do when every man betrothed to her dies before they can marry? Well, Lady Jihane is no man, so... maybe that?

Empress, Goddess by Morgan H. Owen from Gallery YA continues the story begun in Gladiator, Goddess.

Rome has crowned a new empress, but the gods are far from finished with her. Claudia’s rule is fragile from the moment it begins. Assassins stalk the palace, the Senate turns against her, and ancient deities manoeuvre for power. Forced into dangerous political alliances and a marriage she does not want, Claudia must hide both her doubts and her forbidden love for her fiercely loyal bodyguard, Gia. As rival claimants rise and divine war looms, Claudia is pushed to choose between authenticity and authority, love and survival. Every decision tightens the trap – and the cost of power may be higher than she can bear.

And now we skip ahead to the later 18th century and a fictional biography about the Ladies of Llangollen: My Betterhalf by Genevieve Sinclair. I’ll note that the cover art has hallmarks of generative AI, but the text does not.

They wanted Eleanor for a convent. They wanted Sarah married off to a man she never chose. Instead, two Irish gentlewomen chose each other — defying their families, their fortunes, and everything expected of them, in a devotion so real it would become one of history's most documented love stories.

A Study in Silence by Elizabeth Louise is a Regency romance.

Lady Rosamund Mostyn has spent two years perfecting the art of the safe true thing. A young widow managing a great house, a grieving daughter, and a family that will not stop asking, gently and then not so gently, why there is still no portrait of the husband she lost. She has learned exactly how much of herself a room requires, and how much must stay locked in a drawer upstairs, where no one thinks to look. Then her sister-in-law, tired of a gallery with a missing face in it, hires painter Marguerite Sorel to finish what grief interrupted. What begins as a commission becomes something neither woman has a discreet enough word for.

A Match for Lady Adelaide by Verity Fairbanks from Inked Pages tackles the Regency marriage mart from the point of view of a woman who prefers not to marry and one who makes marriages her profession.

The Earl of Wychcombe owes fourteen thousand six hundred pounds he cannot pay, and he has found only one way out of it: his sister. So he engages Miss Georgiana Fell, the most honest woman in London and the most expensive, to see Lady Adelaide Merrick married by Michaelmas. Adelaide has run her estate since she was twenty and can tell you precisely what the law will do to it on the morning she takes a husband. She is not refusing a man. She is refusing to be erased. Georgiana has placed forty-one women in nine years, and she has never once been wrong about what happens to the ones nobody places. Neither woman is wrong. And by the time Georgiana Fell understands what she has actually been selling for nine years, she has already been paid to hand Adelaide to somebody else.

Time Never Waits (Chathom Chronicles # 1) by Samantha Calcott & Melinda Lauer from Partners in Crime Book Services is the only sapphic book so far in this romance series.

Rose Mowbray, daughter of the Third Earl of Rothesay in Chathom County, knows few things for certain after enduring loss as a child. One thing she does know is that her best friend will always be by her side. Winnifred Warwick, daughter of Lord Warwick, knows many things for certain thanks to a keen mind and easy life. But the thing she knows above all is that she’s madly in love with her best friend.

Her Lady's Companion by Odette Valehart is another book with a generative AI cover but no other hallmarks of AI production so I’m giving it the benefit of the doubt on the text.

Eleanor Hartley takes the position of lady's companion at Ashcombe Hall out of necessity — a genteel occupation for a woman with no fortune left and a younger brother's school fees to pay. She expects long evenings of reading aloud, quiet correspondence, and the practiced invisibility of good service. She does not expect Lady Georgiana Ashcombe. Widowed young, independent in a way few women of her station are permitted to be, Georgiana has spent eighteen months learning to wear grief like armor. She does not expect to feel anything at all for her new companion — certainly not this. In a world that offers no safe word for what grows between them, Eleanor and Georgiana must decide whether the life society allows them is worth more than the one they actually want.

The Crooked Medium's Guide to Terror (Crooked Medium #2) by Stephen Cox takes us into the world of Victorian spiritualism.

London 1882. A carpenter is killed by a train - an eerie, brutal crime. Flamboyant spiritualist medium Mrs Ashton and her sapphic partner Braddie seek justice for the widow. A charismatic rival medium takes London by storm. Dock-lass Maisie sees her frightening prophesy of vengeance. A noble family is devastated, but worse is to come. Outgunned and bewildered, the three confront a deadly conspiracy. They risk losing everything.

A Ruin of Roses by Corinne Astier gives the second-chance romance a dark turn.

Lady Rosanna Meighan is trapped in a loveless marriage of convenience but the past is a ghost that refuses to stay buried. When a pressed violet arrives at a high-society gala—the signature of a love she was forced to abandon a decade ago—Rosanna discovers that her former flame, the now-ruthless businesswoman Millie McArthy, has returned. And Millie is willing to use blackmail to achieve her retribution.

The Last Telegram of Mrs Hudson by Mattea Orr from Head of Zeus asks the question, what if Sherlock Holmes inherited his deductive powers from his mother? There’s a second book in this series coming in a few months.

Heart-broken, widowed, and penniless, Katherine Hudson never wished to become a lady's maid to the eccentric Violet Holmes, mother of a precocious seven-year-old Sherlock. To keep her beloved family out of the poorhouse, Hudson trades her telegraphic career for a job in service, just like the one that cost her father his life. She quickly discovers, though, that working for the recently widowed Lady Holmes demands far more than learning the latest hairstyles. Instead, she engages in a most scandalous and unladylike activity: investigations. When a body shows up, Hudson will need to dodge her budding feelings for Lady Holmes and unravel a family secret.

A Deadly Entanglement (Harriman & Mancini Mystery #2) by Cathy Pegau from Minotaur Books continues the adventures of an industrialist and private detective in early 20th century New York.

Margot Baxter Harriman is organizing a fundraiser for the crowded, overworked city charity hospital, hoping to do good and give back–until a body falls past a third-floor window. The nurse’s death is quickly ruled a suicide, but fellow nurse CeeCee Foxmoor isn’t so sure: this isn’t the first suspicious death. As Margot’s friend and the live-in partner of investigator Rett Mancini, CeeCee’s concerns draw both Margot and Rett into an undercover scheme to untangle the threads behind the deaths everyone else is ready to overlook.

The Borderless Sky by Kim Kirkley hints at the unexplained.

England, 1924. A handshake. A murder. A secret that cannot be named. He shook her hand. That was all. A handshake — and then he was dead. She saw what no one else saw. She wrote it down. She told the truth. Nobody believed her. A love story wearing a murder mystery's coat, set in the fog and candlelight of 1920s England — and somewhere else entirely by the time it ends. Two women. An arrangement that is not what it appears to be. A killer no one suspects. And a truth that will cost everything to speak out loud.

There’s lots going on in the 1920s this month, including The Marigold Room by Josephine Bray from Inked Pages.

Twenty-two steps below West Forty-ninth Street, the Marigold Room has a pressed tin ceiling, ninety-six seats, and a rule nobody has ever written down: what happens on the floor is nobody’s business. Ottilie Reisz has held that door open for eleven years. She has also never been photographed, never owned anything, and never once put her name to a single piece of paper in this city — because the lease is in a dead man’s company, and she has no right to sign a word of it. Vivienne Lasker writes a syndicated column and has a mother in a sanatorium she cannot afford. Her editor is offering two thousand dollars for the name behind the Marigold Room, and Vivienne is very good at her job.

You Made Me Love You by K D Jensen is a story about discovering what your dreams really are.

Mary Willis thought flying was Ellie Bradford's dream. She was wrong. When thirteen-year-old Eleanor Bradford is abandoned by her parents in the small South Carolina town of Harper's Grove, the Willis family gives her something she has never truly known: a home. And in Mary Willis, Ellie finds a love that will shape the rest of her life. As the girls grow into women, their lives take different paths during World War II, but the war helps them come to understand what has been there between them all along—and that the dreams they chased weren’t their dreams after all.

The Quiet Fields by Zinnia Bradley is a mid-century coming of age story.

Pennsylvania, 1956. Seventeen-year-old Ruth Miller has always known what is expected of her: help on the family farm, finish school, and someday build the kind of life a young woman in Alder Creek is supposed to want. Then Claire Whitfield arrives. What begins as an unexpected friendship slowly becomes something deeper—something neither of them has the words, or the freedom, to name. As the years carry Ruth from rural Pennsylvania to Newark and eventually New York City, she begins to discover a life she once could not have imagined. Through friendship, heartbreak, art, loss, and love, Ruth must decide how much of herself she is willing to hide—and what it means to finally live on her own terms.

Other Books of Interest

There are a few titles where identities are ambiguous enough I wasn’t sure about classifying them as sapphic. The first two are in K'Anne Meinel’s Crazy Woman series from Shadoe Publishing, which alternates what pronouns are used for the protagonist. Crazy Woman and Women of Adventure follow the life and loves of Shelby. Stolen as a child from St. Louis, a little girl is raised by mountain men in the Rockies. Raised a boy, thinking as a man, with a man’s taste for women, Shelby knows she is a woman but identifies and lives as a man. His first wife teaches him how to love, but the consequences of her death give Shelby the nickname “Crazy Woman.” A second wife is new to loving a woman, but she accepts the challenge. But the fur trade is dying off, family ties compete with the pull of the mountains, and the desire for a child tests their marriage.

In Hearts on the Table by Susan Metallo from Candlewick the setting may be World War II but the plot has a definite Shakespearean flavor. It isn’t clear whether there’s sapphic attraction outside the gender-disguise shenanigans, but I’m always game for a Twelfth Night variation.

Violet is used to winning—with her mathematical mind, no one stands a chance of beating her at cards, or much of anything else. So, when her wrathful father threatens to marry her and her trans twin brother Seb to the highest bidders, she’s certain they can escape England, even with a war on. But before they reach safety in Italy, a U-boat sinks their ship, and Violet washes up on a small island, on the wrong side of enemy lines, desperate to find her missing twin. And you can guess where the plot goes from there.

What Am I Reading?

So what have I been reading lately? When I was reviewing my book log to write this up, I realized I’d missed a few books I read back in May (which should have been part of my June-July catch-up episode). These included a typically delightful K.J. Charles m/m Regency, How to Fake it in Society, in which a likeable nebbish stumbles into an unexpected fortune and gets tangled up with an equally likeable fake aristocrat who promises to help him find his feet in high society.

I also listened to The Isle in the Silver Sea by Tasha Suri which tackles the power of story and has several poignant queer romance threads. As part of my reading for the Hugos I listened to “Automatic Noodle” by Annalee Newitz which is about a group of robots setting up a fast-food shop in a post-war dystopia. In fact, a fair amount of the Hugo-finalist short fiction this year poked at ideas around artificial intelligences and fabricated personalities with an oddly positive spin, considering the contemporary landscape and discourse around generative AI.

More recently, my broken arm having recovered enough to allow me to return to bicycling, I listened to Cathy Pegau’s A Murderous Business—a mystery set in early 20th century New York where a woman who has inherited ownership of the family business hires a female PI to dig out corruption in the firm.

Before I was released to bicycle again, I was putting in time at the gym on the treadmill which somehow called for something much more fluffy, and I’ve been listening to some P.G. Wodehouse, including Right Ho, Jeeves!

My drive down to Worldcon in Anaheim gave me a chance to listen to T. Kingfisher’s eerie portal fantasy The Hollow Places, followed up with the more comic Nine Goblins. T. Kingfisher, in her alter ego as Ursula Vernon was the toastmistress at Worldcon and filled the spaces around the Hugo Award announcements with a litany of weird and disturbing animal facts, which was exactly the job she was hired for. You should have been there.