AmongReaders.com Add a tiny library
📚 AmongReaders — track what you read, talk chapter by chapter without spoilers, and read with friends. Free.Join AmongReadersSign in

🧲 Books like this

Olivia

Dorothy Bussy, Olivia, Dorothy Strachey · back to the book

What’s in it

Tap a tag: ❤ = this matters to me · tap again ✕ = don’t care · again to reset. The list below updates each time.

24 books with the same feel

Include books by the same author
❤️

Learned by Heart

Emma Donoghue · 338 pages

Boarding SchoolFirst LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistForbidden Love
❤️

Thérèse and Isabelle

Violette Leduc · 126 pages

"Thérèse and Isabelle is the tale of two boarding school girls in love. In 1966 when it was originally published in France, the text was censored because of its explicit depiction of young homosexuality. With this publication, the original, unexpurgated text--a stunning literary portrayal of female desire and sexuality--is available to a US audience for the first time. Included is an afterword by

Boarding SchoolFirst LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
❤️

In One Person

John Irving · 448 pages

A New York Times bestselling novel of desire, secrecy, and sexual identity, In One Person is a story of unfulfilled love—tormented, funny, and affecting—and an impassioned embrace of our sexual differences. Billy, the bisexual narrator and main character of In One Person, tells the tragicomic story (lasting more than half a century) of his life as a "sexual suspect," a phrase first used by John Ir

Boarding SchoolFirst LoveForbidden LoveLGBTQ+ Protagonist
❤️

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.

First LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistForbidden LoveLiterary Fiction
❤️

Annie on My Mind

Nancy Garden · 233 pages

This groundbreaking book is the story of two teenage girls whose friendship blossoms into love and who, despite pressures from family and school that threaten their relationship, promise to be true to each other and their feelings. This book is so truthful and honest, it has been banned from many school libraries and even publicly burned in Kansas City.

Boarding SchoolFirst LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistForbidden Love
❤️

Odd Girl Out

Ann Bannon · 192 pages

In the 1950s, Ann Bannon broke through the shame and isolation typically portrayed in lesbian pulps, offering instead women characters who embraced their sexuality. With Odd Girl Out, Bannon introduces Laura Landon, whose love affair with her college roommate Beth launched the lesbian pulp fiction genre.

First LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistForbidden LoveClassics
❤️

Plain Bad Heroines

Emily M. Danforth · 640 pages

Boarding SchoolLGBTQ+ ProtagonistForbidden LoveLiterary Fiction
❤️

Quicksand

Jun'ichiro Tanizaki

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistForbidden LoveLiterary FictionClassics
🙂

The Heart of Thomas

Moto Hagio · 515 pages

Boys' boarding school attendee Thomas Werner falls to his death after sending a cryptic letter to a schoolmate, a trauma that sends the school into turmoil until a new student arrives who looks exactly like Thomas.

Boarding SchoolFirst LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistClassics
🙂

Tipping the Velvet

Sarah Waters · 480 pages

Nan King, an oyster girl, is captivated by the music hall phenomenon Kitty Butler, a male impersonator extraordinaire treading the boards in Canterbury. Through a friend at the box office, Nan manages to visit all her shows and finally meet her heroine. Soon after, she becomes Kitty's dresser and the two head for the bright lights of Leicester Square where they begin a glittering career as music-h

First LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistForbidden LoveLiterary Fiction
🙂

Almost Life

Kiran Millwood Hargrave · 384 pages

First LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistForbidden LoveLiterary Fiction
🙂

Villette

Charlotte Bronte

Boarding SchoolForbidden LoveLiterary FictionClassics
🙂

Call Me by Your Name

Andre Aciman · 256 pages

It's the summer of 1983, and precocious 17-year-old Elio Perlman is spending the days with his family at their 17th-century villa in Lombardy, Italy. He soon meets Oliver, a handsome doctoral student who's working as an intern for Elio's father. Amid the sun-drenched splendor of their surroundings, Elio and Oliver discover the heady beauty of awakening desire over the course of a summer that will

First LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistForbidden LoveLiterary Fiction
🙂

Winger

Andrew Smith

Two years younger than his classmates at a prestigious boarding school, fourteen-year-old Ryan Dean West grapples with living in the dorm for troublemakers, falling for his female best friend who thinks of him as just a kid, and playing wing on the Varsity rugby team with some of his frightening new dorm-mates.

Boarding SchoolForbidden LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistFirst Person Narrator
🙂

The Summer I Wasn't Me

Jessica Verdi · 342 pages

"Ever since her mom found out she was in love with a girl, seventeen-year-old Lexi's afraid that what's left of her family is going to fall apart for good. New Horizons summer camp promises a new life for Lexi--she swears she can change. She can learn to like boys. But denying her feelings is harder than she thinks"--

First LoveForbidden LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistFirst Person Narrator
🙂

The History Boys

Alan Bennett · 109 pages

In Alan Bennet's new play, staff room rivalry and the anarchy of adolescence provoke insistent questions about history and how you teach it; about education and its purpose.

Boarding SchoolLGBTQ+ ProtagonistClassicsTeacher-Student Affair
🙂

Read Me Like a Book

Liz Kessler · 304 pages

Ashleigh Walker is a mediocre student with an assortment of friends, a sort-of boyfriend, and no plans for the future. Then a straight-from-college English teacher, Miss Murray, takes over Ash s class and changes everything. Miss Murray smiles a lot. She shares poetry with curse words in it. She s, well, cool. And she seems to really care about her students. About Ashleigh. For the first time, Ash

First LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistForbidden LoveFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Beauty of the Broken

Tawni Waters · 368 pages

First LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistForbidden LoveFemale Lead
🙂
Boarding SchoolFirst LoveForbidden LoveFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Giovanni's Room

James Baldwin · 224 pages

Considered an 'audacious' second novel, GIOVANNI'S ROOM is set in the 1950s Paris of American expatriates, liaisons, and violence. This now-classic story of a fated love triangle explores, with uncompromising clarity, the conflicts between desire, conventional morality and sexual identity.

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistForbidden LoveLiterary FictionClassics
🙂

The Necessary Hunger

Nina Revoyr · 365 pages

First LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
🙂

Little & Lion

Brandy Colbert · 341 pages

When Suzette comes home to Los Angeles from her boarding school in New England, she isn't sure if she'll ever want to go back. LA is where her friends and family are (along with her crush, Emil). And her stepbrother, Lionel, who has been diagnosed with bipolar disorder, needs her emotional support. But as she settles into her old life, Suzette finds herself falling for someone new; the same girl h

LGBTQ+ ProtagonistFirst LoveBoarding SchoolFirst Person Narrator
🙂

At Swim, Two Boys

Jamie O'Neill · 609 pages

Set during the year preceding the Easter Uprising of 1916—Ireland’s brave but fractured revolt against British rule—*At Swim, Two Boys* is a tender, tragic love story and a brilliant depiction of people caught in the tide of history. Powerful and artful, and ten years in the writing, it is a masterwork from Jamie O’Neill. Jim Mack is a naïve young scholar and the son of a foolish, aspiring shop

First LoveForbidden LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary Fiction
🙂

Blue Is the Warmest Color

Julie Maroh · 160 pages

"Blue is the Warmest Color is a graphic novel about growing up, falling in love, and coming out. Clementine, a high school student, has an average life: she has friends, family, and the romantic attention of the boys in her school. When her openly gay best friend takes her out on the town, she wanders into a lesbian bar where she encounters Emma: a punkish, confident girl with blue hair. Their att

First LoveForbidden LoveLGBTQ+ ProtagonistLiterary Fiction

In the works

To be read SpinnerCan’t pick your next book? Spin your Want to read.Blind date with a bookPick a mood, unwrap a surprise.Add a tiny librarySnap a little free library and its books.