7 Queer Book Sagas to Lose Yourself In

As the meme goes, I like big books and I cannot lie. There’s something so comforting about surrendering yourself to long, involved stories that take you on sweeping journeys across time and space. As a teenager, I read so many book series, losing myself in fantastical worlds full of swords and castles and dragons, but there was nary a gay to be found in most of them. Which is perhaps why the ones that did include queer characters have stuck with me for so long. With increasing LGBTQ+ representation in fiction of all stripes, I’m pleased to report I’ve found far more thicc queer books to sink my teeth into as an adult.

But sagas — the weighted blankets of books, if you will — don’t always have to be literally lengthy in order to feel all encompassing. There’s a reason I’m a sucker for novels billed as “era-spanning” and “intergenerational,” especially when it comes to queer literature. This is probably, in part, due to the nature of queer ancestry, which is so often indirect. Many of us have to look outside the histories of our families of origin in order to discover some version of ourselves in the past. But whether they clock in at a sprawling 1000 pages or a dense 100, sagas are sometimes exactly what we need to remind ourselves how expansive we queers are.

So if you, too, are looking for some books to give yourself up to, here is an eclectic mix of sagas to check out: 

I told you I’m a sucker for era-spanning and intergenerational queer novels. Wolfgang-Smith’s beautifully written debut Glassworks is certainly both of those things. We begin in Boston in 1910 with Agnes Carter, a philanthropist whose family fortune has been handed down from her ancestor Prudence and her lover, Elizabeth. But when Agnes marries — as she feels she must, even though she’s not particularly interested — things begin to go south for her, both personally and financially. She finds solace in a glassblower, Ignace Novak, whose skill lies in making delicate, perfect, anatomically correct models of plants and insects.

The novel moves from Agnes’s story to that of her son, Edward, in 1938, then to Edward’s child, Novak, in 1986, and finally to Flip, in 2015, a lesbian living with her ex-girlfriend (you know how it goes) in Boston. Agnes and Edward are both nominally straight, but neither ends up in what you might consider a typical hetero relationship, especially considering their respective eras, while Novak and Flip are openly queer. But more than their particular individual identities, the novel examines the way both pain and beauty can be passed down through generations, as well as the way family bonds can be chosen.

This honker of a novel is perhaps science fiction writer Samuel R. Delaney’s best-known work, although his induction into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame back in 2002 is a testament to just how influential and beloved his entire oeuvre is. Full disclosure: Dhalgren is long — really long, like 800+ pages long — but it is so, so, so worth it. I kept it on my nightstand as a bedtime book, and kept finding myself accidentally still awake at 1:30 a.m. because I couldn’t stop reading.

Dhalgren’s main character (and occasionally narrator?) doesn’t remember his own name when he arrives in Bellona, a fictional Midwestern city. Bellona once had a population of around two million but due to an undisclosed catastrophe (disease? a bomb? a mysterious third thing?) it is now home to only a thousand or so and is shrouded in a constant haze of smoke. Bellona has no contact with the outside world, and it seems that nothing and no one is coming to help. 

The Kid (or Kidd, or Kid), as the main character comes to be called, isn’t sure what’s brought him to Bellona, what he was looking for, or what he needs. But over time, he becomes enmeshed in the fabric of this anarchist city where money holds no value, monogamy is optional, and time seems to pass in mysterious ways.

Perhaps most known for The Line of Beauty, novelist Alan Hollinghurst is an expert of the well-turned phrase and the dry English understatement, and his newest, The Sparsholt Affair, is no exception. This is another era-spanning book (although its rhythms, language, and plot are all very different from Glassworks) which follows England’s changing mores around homosexuality.

The novel’s first part is narrated by Freddie Green who is recalling his time as a student at Oxford in 1940, where he first met and came to know David Sparsholt. England is in the thick of war with Germany, but coursework is continuing apace, at least for a time. Freddie’s closest friends, Peter and Evert, are both gay, and although no one calls it that or mentions it overtly, Freddie is clearly comfortable with this fact. Indeed, it’s his window that looks into Sparsholt’s window across the way, and it’s there that Freddie, Peter, and Evert first spot Sparsholt’s impressively toned body and become somewhat obsessed with it, with him. But David Sparsholt is engaged to be married. He’s as straight as can be. Isn’t he?

The remainder of the novel is concerned with the next Sparsholt in line, David’s son Johnny, who becomes the bearer of an unfortunately recognizable name, followed everywhere by the scandal known as “the Sparsholt affair,” a fact that complicates his life in the ways that only the so-called sins of our fathers can. 

Okay, look, technically, this is four books, but taken together (and there is an omnibus edition now!), the series certainly counts as a saga! The four silkpunk novellas in this series are set in an empire called the Protectorate and include elemental magic called Slackcraft, large flying beasts, a fomenting revolution, and so much more. 

In the first book, The Black Tides of Heaven, we meet twins Akeha and Mokoya, children of the Protector, and follow them as they grow up, choose their genders, and set off on different but intertwining paths in life. In the second, The Red Threads of Fortune, we meet Akeha and Mokoya again but some years later. Whereas the first book takes place over the course of years, the second takes place over no more than a few weeks, as the twins and others fight to keep a city safe from a mutilated creature with a human soul grafted onto it. 

The third book, The Descent of Monsters, is told through documents — reports, letters, transcripts — and dives further into the heart of the Protectorate’s most horrible project: a facility where children are kept and experimented upon in order to help the Protector — Akeha and Mokoya’s mother — gain a powerful human weapon. Finally, in the last book, The Ascent to Godhood, we learn about the Protector herself, and how she became the cruel and calculating ruler of a vast empire. Ultimately, Yang queers so many things in this series: genre, language, gender, as well as the very nature of what a series can be. 

English lesbian writer Sarah Waters is especially known for her novels set in the Victorian era, such as Fingersmith (adapted in 2016 by Park Chan-wook into the film The Handmaiden) and Tipping the Velvet (yes, both these titles are suggestive of certain sex acts). But The Night Watch, a hefty historical novel in its own right, takes place in quite a different time: World War II and its aftermath. 

Beginning in 1947, we meet several women: Kay, Viv, Helen, and Julia. London still bears various signs of the war that has ended so recently, and the women are still recovering from their various experiences of the conflict. Kay spends most of her time in her attic room in a boarding house on Lavender Hill watching people come and go from the Christian Science doctor who lives below her. In another part of London, Helen and Viv work at a matchmaking business, relishing their lunch and cigarette breaks, and although they’re friendly enough, they both keep secrets from one another. Helen, for instance, often calls her girlfriend Julia, making sure she’s at home, while Viv changes the subject whenever the topic of her brother, Duncan, comes up.

The novel then moves backwards, first to 1944 and then to 1941, and we get to see exactly how these people have become entangled in one another’s lives, what loves they’ve lost and gained, and how vital women became to the workforce during WWII.

Shorter than the rest of the entries on this list, Lambda Literary Award winner Zeyn Joukhadar’s second novel, The Thirty Names of Night, just feels big, in multiple senses: big-hearted, time-sprawling, and full of imagery as rich as flourless chocolate cake. 

The novel starts with an unnamed Syrian American narrator who, while knowing he’s not a woman, hasn’t yet been able to fully come out to himself, let alone to anyone else. Still mourning the loss of his mother in a fire five years prior, this narrator is living with and caring for his teta, his grandmother, who is in remission from cancer. In his spare time, he paints murals of birds on buildings in Lower Manhattan, in an area that used to be called Little Syria, but that has largely been demolished. Before she died, the narrator’s mother was involved in a fight with the city to try to preserve the old tenement buildings. Since he can’t join in that fight anymore, the narrator becomes invested in another of his mother’s obsessions: a rare bird species only witnessed by three people, including herself. 

In alternating chapters, we learn the story of Laila Z, a Syrian woman who emigrated to the United States as a teenager. Laila Z’s interest in flight, and by extension, in birds, begins early as well, when she sees a woman in her village fly using a homemade contraption. Laila is also one of the three people to have witnessed the aforementioned rare bird. 

As the two strands of the novel echo each other and lead slowly to the narrator finding what he wants and needs, it becomes clear in Joukhadar’s beautiful rendering of contemporary life that the past is never gone; it’s present in the paved roads under our feet, in the land beneath them, in the marrow of our bones, and in the stories we tell. 

Full disclosure: this is one of those sagas I mentioned devouring as a teenager. But unlike the vast majority of those series, this one is queer as hell. Set in an alternate world, in the realm of Terre D’ange, this book is as sexy as it is subversive. 

Phédre nó Delaunay is sold into indentured servitude by parents who are more interested in their own love affair than in the girl born of it. Early in her time in one of the famed Thirteen Houses of the Night Court, Phédre is recognized by a nobleman as having been pricked by Kushiel’s dart: she has a blood-red spot in one of her eyes, which means that she has been blessed — or cursed — to find pleasure in pain.

Here’s the thing about Terre D’ange, and Phédre’s place in it: not only is sex a holy act in this world, but sex work is holy too, and its practitioners are respected and treated as such. Phédre’s gift for twining pleasure and pain make her uniquely suited to serve as a very specialized spy for the nobleman who buys her bond. She quickly becomes her own mistress, though, under less than ideal circumstances, and embarks on a series of fascinating adventures that blend political intrigue, sensual pleasures, and a freedom to (as Terre D’ange’s godlike figure Elua commands his people) “love as thou wilt.” 

This is also the first of a trilogy that is followed by two other complete trilogies, with a new book set in this world coming out this summer. So you won’t ever run out of reading.

Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.