Labrys Lit: What Our Lesbian Book Group is Reading in 2025
By Claire L. Heuchan
In 2025 we’re continuing to read lesbian books together as a community. This last year the far-right has gained political power across Europe and in the United States of America, and so it’s crucial that we continue to affirm the dignity and worth of lesbian experiences when our rights are in jeopardy. As Alice Walker once wrote, ‘resistance is the secret of joy’, and I hope that these books will bring you much of it.
Each and every title challenges and subverts the dominant structures of power in unique and often surprising ways. There’s science-fiction and fantasy; thriller and feminist documentation; horror and historical fiction; stories about women falling for each other and another about women continuing to nurture that love decades after it first took root. And, in the aftermath of Elon Musk funnelling over a quarter of a billion dollars into Donald Trump’s presidential campaign over the US election, the recurring anti-capitalist theme feels more apt now than ever.
January: The Verifiers, by Jane Pek
February: Neon Roses, by Rachel Dawson
March: A Bookshop of One’s Own, by Jane Cholmeley
April: The Red Files, by Lee Winter
May: There Are More Things, by Yara Rodrigues Fowler
June: The Night Alphabet, by Joelle Taylor
July: Fair Play, by Tove Jansson
August: The Hunt, by Kelly J. Ford
September: The Pull of the Stars, by Emma Donoghue
October: The Blonde Dies First, by Joelle Washington
November: Pomegranate, by Helen Elaine Lee
December: Gideon the Ninth, by Tamsyn Muir
The Verifiers is a whip-smart detective novel about digital double-lives and the sinister side of corporate greed. The only thing I’m looking forward to more than reading the sequel is discussing this story with you women.
Neon Roses was my best new read of 2024, a stunning historical novel set in a small Welsh community during the miners’ strike – meeting lesbians rallying in solidarity forever changes one young woman’s life. It has such a vivid sense of place and time and has a magnificent narrative voice.
A Bookshop of One’s Own is a reminder than one of the many great gifts given to us by the second wave is an understanding of how important it is to document feminist activism. If like me you’ve always wished to go back in time and visit Silver Moon, the radical women’s bookshop, you’re in for a treat.
The Red Files is a thriller told through the eyes of a young reporter hungry to prove herself, so much so that she’s even willing to team up with the Caustic Queen – her least favourite colleague – to get to the heart of a corporate conspiracy. Enemies-to-lovers romance meets anti-capitalism!
There Are More Things is a novel about the political awakening of two young women, both of Brazilian heritage, sharing a flat in central London post-Brexit. The style is heavily influenced by Modernism, and its depiction of activist spaces will ring true to plenty of feminists.
The Night Alphabet is a bold and imaginative work of science-fiction, and the first novel from celebrated poet Joelle Taylor. It’s a fresh new take on the timeless theme of women’s political resistance and the ways sisterhood connects us across generations.
Fair Play is our translated text of 2025, a novella about the long-term relationship between two female creatives who occupy different flats in the same house. It was inspired by the real-life romance between Tove Jansson and Tuulikki Peitila. (And the audiobook is narrated by Emma D’Arcy, AKA Queen Rhaenyra Targaryen, First of her Name; Queen of the Andals, the Rhoynar and the First Men; Lady of the Seven Kingdoms; Protector of the Realm!)
In my opinion Kelly J. Ford is one of the most underrated living lesbian writers, and I couldn’t be more excited to share The Hunt with you. Nobody does rural noir quite like Ford. This is a twisty mystery about community, class, and grief.
Emma Donoghue is such a wonderful writer that it was a real challenge settling on which book to include. Thankfully, multiple women requested The Pull of the Stars, solving this particular dilemma. It’s a remarkable work of historical fiction set on a labour and delivery ward during the Great Influenza epidemic of 1918 – both Donoghue and our narrator do an incredible job of treating women’s bodies with dignity.
The Blonde Dies First is a delightfully camp horror novel perfect for Halloween. After accidentally summoning a demon, this group of friends must work together to flip the script on the rules of traditional horror films and find a way to survive.
Pomegranate is a story of family, healing, and redemption told through a Black lesbian protagonist freshly released from the US prison system. It’s a powerful story about finding ways of holding onto your humanity while navigating a system that sets you up to fail.
Gideon the Ninth is an iconic fantasy novel about lesbian necromancers in space. And while I try not to set only the most visible stories, this book deserves all the hype it received and then some. Dark, irreverent, and wickedly funny, it’s the perfect way to close our year.
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Among our membership it’s no secret that putting our 2025 reading list together has been more challenging than any other year – not because of our increased commitment to reading books by women of colour and working-class women, but rather due to the systemic inequalities underpinning the publishing industry. I think it’s important to be clear where the problem lies in how I frame this particular issue, as – in mainstream society, as opposed to Labrys Lit – many people still view efforts towards diversity and inclusion with hostility and suspicion.
Yes, my own ill health this year absolutely slowed down the 2025 reading list release. But the lack of consistent representation for lesbians of colour is a recurring stumbling block. Firstly, the paperback release of a Black British author’s novel – which will almost certainly be featured in 2026 – was pushed back to an unspecified date; in order to keep costs down for members, I try to avoid setting hardcover books whenever possible.
Why, I joked with a friend, couldn’t it have been one of the books by a white author that went out of print? Not because I have anything against those particular stories, but rather because finding another equally brilliant and readily available paperback by a white woman would have been the work of an instant. A study by the New York Times estimates that, of English-language fiction books published between 1950 and 2018, 95% were by white authors. Resisting that pattern of over-representation through curation is an ongoing struggle.
Feeling my frustration, this friend recommended a glorious historical novel set in India, which I knew within the first few pages would be perfect for Labrys Lit… Until it went out of print right before I initially planned to publish the 2025 list. At the time of writing this blog post, it’s only possible to buy second-hand copies or US imports. And it’s a tragedy that such a rich, exquisite novel will never receive the readership or media attention it deserves.
Then I found a translated novel about a Black lesbian who leaves her abusive husband to live on her own terms. After Solo Dance’s discussion about our preference for female translators to avoid any distortion of lesbian experience via the male gaze, it felt like a strong choice. But this book turns out to have been authored by a heterosexual woman – as the word lesbian is used in classification by online retailers, and most promotional content is in Dutch, her sexuality wasn’t immediately apparent to me.
After that I tried a Young Adult novel, which – while perfectly worthy – would have been a bad fit for the group. With every prospective Labrys Lit title, I’m active in thinking about how elements of characterisation, plot, theme, and style could feature in potential discussion points; how women are likely to respond to aspects of a text. I also have to weigh up how its genre, tone, and length work in relation to other books lined up for that year. And this particular story felt incongruous at best. However tempting in the short term, I knew it definitely wasn’t worth fucking up the harmony flowing through eleven other books for the sake of a quick fix. So, the hunt continued.
There were a lot of late nights reading possible texts and searching for replacements. Blood, sweat, and more than a few tears went into our book 2025 list. My therapist even heard about it when we were working on the relationship between my people-pleasing tendencies and recurring burnout – I was profoundly afraid of letting women down; of failing to meet the trust and expectations placed in me as Chair of Labrys Lit. And at this point the May slot felt absolutely cursed.
After making that discovery about the Dutch book I seriously contemplated reducing Labrys Lit’s commitment to pluralistic reading. But it felt like the wrong choice, because the most consistent feedback I’ve received from women since founding this book group is how much they appreciate reading work by writers from a wide mix of ethnicities and nationalities.
However challenging it was for me personally, in my gut I knew that giving up was the wrong call – because complacency changes nothing about which stories are heard or given the recognition they deserve. It took a lot of digging, but eventually I stumbled across a review of There Are More Things on BookTok. It’s an incredible novel, and we haven’t yet read any work from the Brazilian diaspora as a group. Plus, Modernism has a long and proud sapphic history we have yet to delve into. Persistence paid off. But: it shouldn’t be this hard to avoid positioning white as default, and instead reflect a wide spectrum of humanity.
In 2021, the first year of Labrys Lit, I – rather naively – made the majority of our reading list books by women of colour in the belief that it would be straightforward replicating this representation in subsequent years’ lists. And while I stand by each and every one of those choices based on the quality of those stories and the fruitfulness of group discussions they all inspired, in subsequent years I was kicking myself for not rationing them out more carefully. Because really, in a world where the majority of women are of colour, it should be the easiest thing in the world finding four in print and readily available stories by us every single year.
I’m sharing this not to complain (though putting together this reading list tested both my patience and sanity!), but to highlight the consequences of systemic inequality and bias – which become self-perpetuating in an industry that continues to centre whiteness at the expense of Black, Asian, Arab, Indigenous, and First Nations people around the world. And also because, in being transparent about my own experiences of curation, I hope to demystify the process for other women looking to build their own lesbian community spaces. Reading about the spaces women pioneered during the second wave was a huge inspiration for Labrys Lit, so I’m paying that debt of knowledge forward.
While putting this list together was challenging, I’m delighted by the end result and couldn’t be more excited to hear our members’ perspectives on every book. Hearing women’s insights, criticisms, and the things that thrilled or excited them about each lesbian story is an immense privilege. I am in constant awe of their creativity and generosity in sharing. And while 2024 was the first year we featured a book by one of our members (the phenomenal A. L. Aikman), I’m confident it won’t be the last. In the mean time our imaginations will feast on these twelve lesbian books.
To join Labrys Lit, sign up here. Membership is strictly lesbian-only.
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LabrysLit books for 2025 are available at #OurFeministLibrary.