18 books like Olivia
Desert of the Heart
Possibly Jane Rule's best known novel, The Desert of the Heart is the story of a free spirited woman falling for a repressed older woman. Evelyn Hall is taking respite at a ranch for women as she seeks a divorce after years of marriage. Written in 1964, it serves as a fascinating snapshot into the lives and regulations of women seeking their freedom.
Dr. Hall stays at a Nevada ranch where she…
Shares: LGBTQ fiction before Stonewall, Lesbians, Identity
Dusty Answer
Rosamond Lehmann's first novel, now a classic of British literature, tells a luminous story of friendship, discovery, and forbidden love
This debut novel, set in the early 1900s, tells the story of Judith Earle, a solitary only child growing up in a sprawling house in the Thames Valley. From an early age, she is fascinated by the six cousins who live next door.
 
There's boring, faithful…
Shares: LGBTQ fiction before Stonewall, Lesbians
The Centaur
In a small Pennsylvania town in the late 1940s, schoolteacher George Caldwell yearns to find some meaning in his life. Alone with his teenage son for three days in a blizzard, Caldwell sees his son grow and change as he himself begins to lost touch with his life. Interwoven with the myth of Chiron, the noblest centaur, and his own relationship to Prometheus, The Centaur is one of John Updike's…
Shares: Teacher-student relationships, Teachers
Carmilla
First published as a serial in The Dark Blue (1871–72), Carmilla is narrated by a young woman preyed upon by a female vampire named Carmilla, later revealed to be Mircalla, Countess Karnstein (Carmilla is an anagram of Mircalla). The character is a prototypical example of the lesbian vampire, expressing romantic desires toward the protagonist. The novella notably never acknowledges homosexuality…
Shares: LGBTQ fiction before Stonewall, Lesbians
Maurice
Maurice is a novel by E. M. Forster. A tale of homosexual love in early 20th-century England, it follows Maurice Hall from his schooldays through university and beyond. It was written in 1913–1914, and revised in 1932 and 1959–1960.
Shares: LGBTQ fiction before Stonewall, Coming-of-age
Strangers in paradise
Years before David met Katchoo, he was a ruthless gang member named Yousaka Takahashi who was destined to head the American Yukuza. One day, he discovered guilt and remorse, and started down the path that would make him a mild-mannered artist named David.
Shares: Lesbians, Identity
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark’s timeless classic about a controversial teacher who deeply marks the lives of a select group of students in the years leading up to World War II
"Give me a girl at an impressionable age, and she is mine for life!” So asserts Jean Brodie, a magnetic, dubious, and sometimes comic teacher at the conservative Marcia Blaine School for Girls in Edinburgh. Brodie selects six favorite…
Shares: Teacher-student relationships, Teachers
Captain Underpants and the Wrath of the Wicked Wedgie Woman
"George and Harold have really done it this time--they've created a monster! She's faster, smarter, and more evil than anything the world has seen before--she's Wedgie Woman! With the help of her horrible robots and her horrendous hairdo, Wedgie Woman is on a mission to take over the world, and she'll give a whopping wedgie to anyone who stands in her way--including Captain Underpants."--P. [4]…
Shares: School principals, Teachers
The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas
"The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas ... is not an autobiography by Alice Toklas, Stein's companion from 1907 to her death, but a funny, innovative memoir which pays unusual attention to the 'wives of geniuses' as well as the 'geniuses' themselves. It focuses on the Paris years, mythologizing the Stein-Toklas household and presenting Stein as the writing member of an international art movement…
Shares: Paris, Lesbians
Mister Pip
In a novel that is at once intense, beautiful, and fablelike, Lloyd Jones weaves a transcendent story that celebrates the resilience of the human spirit and the power of narrative to transform our lives.On a copper-rich tropical island shattered by war, where the teachers have fled with most everyone else, only one white man chooses to stay behind: the eccentric Mr. Watts, object of much…
Shares: Teachers, Coming-of-age
My Dark Vanessa
"2000. Bright, ambitious, and yearning for adulthood, fifteen-year-old Vanessa Wye becomes entangled in an affair with Jacob Strane, her magnetic and guileful forty-two-year-old English teacher. 2017. Amid the rising wave of allegations against powerful men, a reckoning is coming due. Strane has been accused of sexual abuse by a former student, who reaches out to Vanessa, and now Vanessa…
Shares: Teacher-student relationships, Teachers
Tea
On a spring day in 1968, eight-year-old Isabel Gold prepares tea for her mother, certain she will drink it and recover from her mysterious sadness. But the tea remains untouched. Not long after, her mother takes her own life. Struggling to understand the ghost her mother left behind, Isabel grows up trying on new identities. Her yearning for an emotional connection finds her falling in and out of…
Shares: Lesbians, Identity
All Day Is a Long Time
One of The Millions' "Most Anticipated Books of 2022" One of PureWow’s "10 Books We Can’t Wait to Read in January" One of BookShop.org's "Notable New Releases" One of The New York Times Book Review’s "16 New Books Coming in January" One of Poets & Writers' "New and Noteworthy Books” "David Sanchez's first novel—brilliant, lyrical, hilarious, heartbreaking—is the definitive handbook to…
Shares: Identity, Coming-of-age
Todos nuestros nombres
Two young friends join an uprising against Uganda's corrupt regime in the early 1970s. As the line blurs between idealism and violence, one of them flees for his life.
Shares: Identity, Coming-of-age
The Idiot
Embarking on her freshman year at Harvard in the early tech days of the 1990s, a young artist and daughter of Turkish immigrants begins a correspondence with an older mathematics student from Hungary while struggling with her changing sense of self, first love and a daunting career prospect.
Shares: Identity, Coming-of-age
Wise men
When Hilly finds himself falling for Lem's niece, Savannah, his affection for her collides with his father's dark secrets. The results shatter his family, and hers. Years later, haunted by his memories of that summer, Hilly sets out to find Savannah.
Shares: Identity, Coming-of-age
Either/or
Selin returns to Harvard for her sophomore year, spends lots of time thinking about Ivan, then moves on.
Shares: Identity, Coming-of-age
When the Moon Is Low
Mahmoud's passion for his wife Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she's ever known. But their happy, middle-class world—a life of education, work, and comfort—implodes when their country is engulfed in war, and the Taliban rises to power.
Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children,…
Shares: Teachers, Coming-of-age