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Into Deep Waters

Kaje Harper · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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❤️

When the Tides Held the Moon

Venessa Vida Kelley · 466 pages

The Shape of Water meets The Greatest Showman in this beautifully illustrated queer historical cozy fantasy, as a young Puerto Rican immigrant goes through a journey of love and self-discovery after capturing a merman for a Coney Island sideshow act in turn-of-the 20th century New York. “Venessa gives life to the most unexpected things. I have a strong, strong feeling that this is the start of som

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistEmotionalHistorical FictionRomance
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Boy Underground

Catherine Ryan Hyde · 336 pages

World War IILGBTQ+ ProtagonistEmotionalHistorical Fiction
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Days of Grace

Catherine Hall · 294 pages

"My memories of Grace" never added up to how she really was. She was always impossible to pin down, dancing just out of my reach, exactly as she did when she was alive. Nora was a girl of twelve when the war broke out and she was forced to join the train-loads of evacuees leaving London's East End for rural Kent. Her surrogate family, the Rivers family, are unlike anyone she has met before and she

World War IILGBTQ+ ProtagonistEmotionalHistorical Fiction
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Unhinge the Universe

Aleksandr Voinov, L.A. Witt · 250 pages

*December 1944, the Battle of the Bulge* SS Lieutenant Hagen Friedrichs is the sole survivor of a party sent to retrieve his brother—and the highly sensitive information he’s carrying—from behind enemy lines. But his daring rescue attempt fails, and Hagen becomes the prisoner. Allied command has ordered Captain John Nicholls to extract critical intelligence from their new Nazi POW. His secre

World War IILGBTQ+ ProtagonistHistorical FictionRomance
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Brothers of the Wild North Sea

Harper Fox · 396 pages

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistEmotionalHistorical FictionRomance
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The Charioteer

Mary Renault · 352 pages

After enduring an injury at Dunkirk during World War II, Laurie Odell is sent to a rural veterans' hospital in England to convalesce. There he befriends the young, bright Andrew, a conscientious objector serving as an orderly. As they find solace and companionship together in the idyllic surroundings of the hospital, their friendship blooms into a discreet, chaste romance. Then one day, Ralph Lany

World War IILGBTQ+ ProtagonistHistorical FictionForbidden Love
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The Song of Achilles

Madeline Miller · 368 pages

This is the story of the seige of Troy from the perspective of Achilles best-friend Patroclus. Although Patroclus is outcast from his home for disappointing his father he manages to be the only mortal who can keep up with the half-God Archilles. Even though many will know the facts behind the story the telling is fresh and engaging.

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistHistorical FictionSexual OrientationForbidden Love
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Michael Chabon · 639 pages

The novel begins in 1939 with the arrival of 19-year-old Josef "Joe" Kavalier as a refugee in New York City, where he comes to live with his 17-year-old cousin Sammy Klayman. Joe escaped from Prague with the help of his teacher Kornblum by hiding in a coffin along with the inanimate Golem of Prague, leaving the rest of his family, including his younger brother Thomas, behind. Besides having a shar

World War IILGBTQ+ ProtagonistEmotionalHistorical Fiction
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Skybound

Aleksandr Voinov · 46 pages

World War IILGBTQ+ ProtagonistHistorical FictionRomance
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The Kingdoms

Natasha Pulley · 448 pages

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistHistorical FictionEmotionalForbidden Love
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Snowball in Hell

Josh Lanyon

World War IILGBTQ+ ProtagonistHistorical FictionRomance
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Snow Falling on Cedars

David Guterson · 424 pages

On San Piedro, an island of rugged, spectacular beauty in Puget Sound, home to salmon fishermen and strawberry farmers, a Japanese-American fisherman stands trial, charged with murder. The year is 1954, and the shadow of World War II, with its brutality abroad and internment of Japanese Americans at home, hangs over the courtroom. Ishmael Cambers, who lost an arm in the Pacific war and now runs th

World War IIEmotionalHistorical FictionOcean and Ships
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Tatiana and Alexander

Paullina Simons · 672 pages

World War IIHistorical FictionEmotionalRomance
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False Colors

Alex Beecroft · 333 pages

For his first command, John Cavendish is given the elderly bomb vessel HMS Meteor, and a crew as ugly as the ship. He’s determined to make a success of their first mission, and hopes the well-liked lieutenant Alfie Donwell can pull the crew together before he has to lead them into battle: stopping the slave trade off the coast of Algiers. Alfie knows that with a single ship, however well manne

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistHistorical FictionRomanceSexual Orientation
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The Invisible Bridge

Julie Orringer

World War IIHistorical FictionEmotionalForbidden Love
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The Unreal Life of Sergey Nabokov

Paul Russell

"In his novel based on the extraordinary life of the gay brother of Vladimir Nabokov, Paul Russell re-creates the rich and changing world in which Sergey, his family and friends lived; from wealth and position in pre-revolutionary Russia, to the halls of Cambridge University, and the Parisian salon of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas. But it is the honesty and vulnerability of Sergey, our young

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistWorld War IIHistorical FictionSexual Orientation
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Corelli's Mandolin

Louis de Bernieres · 437 pages

The Greek island of Cephallonia - peaceful, remote, famed for its beauty, its light, its mythic history - and only just beginning to enter the twentieth century when the tide of World War II rolls onto its shores. This is the setting for Louis de Bernieres's lyrical, heartbreaking, and hilarious chronicle of the days and nights of the island's inhabitants over fifty tumultuous years. "It was an i

World War IIEmotionalHistorical FictionForbidden Love
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Atmosphere: A Love Story

Taylor Jenkins Reid · 352 pages

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s Space Shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the f

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistHistorical FictionEmotionalRomance
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World War IILGBTQ+ ProtagonistHistorical FictionSexual Orientation
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World War IIHistorical FictionEmotionalRomance
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Postcards from No Man's Land

Aidan Chambers · 312 pages

Alternates between two stories--contemporarily, seventeen-year-old Jacob visits a daunting Amsterdam at the request of his English grandmother--and historically, nineteen-year-old Geertrui relates her experience of British soldiers's attempts to liberate Holland from its German occupation.

World War IILGBTQ+ ProtagonistHistorical FictionSexual Orientation
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Learned by Heart

Emma Donoghue · 338 pages

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistEmotionalHistorical FictionRomance
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Bodies of Water

T. Greenwood · 360 pages

In 1960, Billie Valentine is a young housewife living in a sleepy Massachusetts suburb, treading water in a dull marriage and caring for two adopted daughters. Summers spent with the girls at their lakeside camp in Vermont are her one escape - from her husband's demands, from days consumed by household drudgery, and from the nagging suspicion that life was supposed to hold something different. The

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistEmotionalHistorical FictionForbidden Love
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The Hunger Angel

Herta Muller · 304 pages

World War IILGBTQ+ ProtagonistHistorical FictionSexual Orientation
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