100 books like A Lady of Rooksgrave Manor

Red, White, & Royal Blue is one of my all time favorite books, period.

Up there with my non-spicy recommendations, Red, White, & Royal Blue is a lovingly crafted, beautifully executed example of how to do justice to queer representation. Henry and Alex’s love story is everything I wanted it to be and more.

If I could recommend this book five times, I would. As someone who grew up queer without a ton of options for queer literature, this is the book I wish I’d had in middle and high school. So now, it’s the book that I will just continue to read again and again until I know it so well, I can read it with my eyes closed.

Two words. Bisexual representation. The queer community may tend to forget about us bisexuals out here, but Katee Robert certainly did not.

It’s not very often that you see books that focus on an MMF relationship in which the woman is the most recent addition. The loving relationship between Achilles and Patroclus is incredible to begin with. However, when you add the extra dimension of Helen of Troy, the relationship grows and changes into something much more.

Dealing with serious relationship dynamic conflicts, like jealousy, Wicked Beauty shows us that sometimes working through our learned emotional reactions can create something truly beautiful.

If you are into hurt/comfort, this is the series for you.

The slowest of burns, sprinkled with trauma, political intrigue, and a true enemies-to-lovers scenario, this trilogy had me at the edge of my seat until I’d finished every single one. Now, I usually can’t handle too much angst in my day-to-day reads, however, this series had me “listening to the audiobook while at my desk during the day” committed.

It’s heavy and intense, but beautiful and worth the read.

Unlike the other recommendations I’ve given so far, this one is an ongoing series… and a manga.

Now, before you pull back. What if I told you that in addition to the beautiful art, this series had some of the most incredible and complex characters that I’ve seen in queer romance? What if I told you that it touched upon important topics like grief, internalized homophobia, familial expectations, depression, and what it’s like growing up gay in Japan?

Not to mention the sweet, spicy scenes between the two main characters as they grow together in their relationship. It’s one of my all time favorites and even if you aren’t a big manga reader or into anime, it truly is worth it.

This beautiful and immersive novella is a winter-solstice-themed story about a woman and a genderqueer character who have nothing in common except for their mysterious, chaotic, magical, missing boyfriend. His magical experiment goes wrong and finding him requires them to cooperate. They make their way through a strange and wonderful set of clues that bring them closer together. Layla and Nat were both so richly drawn, and the contrast between their ordinary lives and the eerie, ineffable nature of the magic made the book so memorable for me. The whole cast is marvelously queer, and I laughed out loud a couple of times. A gem.

Transgender anarchist author Margaret Killjoy’s collection of short speculative fiction stories, We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow, is a stark contrast to the dazzling high-tech fantasies and cinematic adventures of my first three recommendations. Most of these stories are set in disturbingly plausible and not-at-all-distant futures, and veer into the territories of dark fantasy, gritty dystopianism, and atomspheric horror. No interplanetary space opera here; Killjoy’s protagonists are earthbound, anarchistic outcasts and misfits struggling to survive on the edges of society or in society’s ruins, in worlds gone unfathomably strange. And Killjoy writes it all beautifully, with a clarity of description that often left me stunned by its simple poetic power. This one’s for you if you like your speculative fiction close to the bone.

I found this book through TikTok after a surge of booktokers started to recommend it.

I was instantly intrigued by the premise: presumed dead at Waterloo, a soldier decides to live as herself—trans woman Viola loses her wealth, her title, and her childhood friend Gracewood. But years later, fate draws them together again, and they must contend with their desires and their past together.

This book! I cried, I laughed, I had so many emotions reading this tale. Against all odds, they find each other, they communicate through the unique challenge of attraction after years and Viola’s new womanhood.

There are some incredibly hot scenes which feel all the more tantalizing for the novel’s historical setting. I’ve lent this book to several friends just hoping they experience the same joy I did. 

You can’t go wrong with any Rebekah Weatherspoon book frankly, but Xeni has a special place in my heart because of the leads: Xeni, a witchy bi lead with a very complicated family bumping into a favourite romantic trope: the marriage of convenience (only, it’s very much not convenient, thank you); and Mason, a burly, bearded, bi bear who, I cannot express this clearly enough, is so instantly cuddle-worthy. That these bisexual characters are thrown into this marriage by someone they both loved as part of her will just adds to the trope joy. Beyond that, there’s so much steamy sex-positivity in this book, alongside Weatherspoon’s always brilliant supportive friend groups and mix of chosen and biological family that I found myself taking the dog for extra walks just to keep listening. 

I picked up Narcisa in Portland’s legendary Powell’s bookstore over ten years ago on a whim and it ended up worming its way into my top ten books of all time. The prose is chaotic, evocative, drippy, disgusting, engaging, fantastic. Narcisa is a predatory, magnetic mess of nature and like the narrator, you’ve got to keep flying with her until she throws you down. I was floored and inspired by Shaw’s ability to tame such a blizzard of turmoil between two thin paper covers.

I love this book for so many reasons, but chief among them is how Brandon Taylor captures the totality of the queer experience, warts and all.

His characters don’t have to be virtuous or successful simply because they’re marginalized. This book is unconcerned with respectability politics, instead allowing its characters to get messy, to say the wrong things, to make the worst choices. Instead of trauma and tragedy, each protagonist is simply navigating life, and the narratives here are about queer people but not necessarily about them being queer.

There’s space on the page for them to be more than gay, and no matter what they did, I found myself cheering them on as I read.