Historical Books

Can the heart’s orders overrule the chain of command? 

September 1944. Private Helen Tucker has two goals—to drive for the Women’s Army Corps motor pool and to convince Tee Owens to be more than best friends. Helen has always done whatever it takes to survive, and she’s not good at waiting for what she wants. But Private Teresa Owens is a good Baptist girl who’s struggling with how her feelings for Helen can be wrong when she can’t bear to be without her.

Sergeant Gale Rains has learned to make her way in both the Sioux and White worlds, but will her love for Bett Smythe put her career in the WAC at risk? Private Elizabeth Smythe hopes Rain will be her future, but is she truly free from her past, including her class-conscious family?

Cody Walsh leaves Arkansas for California. Lured by stories of opportunity, even for women, Cody disguises herself as a man and prepares for the arduous journey west. 

Lillie Ellis leaves New York to accept a post as a schoolteacher on the frontier near a small homestead she just inherited from her uncle. Lillie’s ultimate desire is to become a painter, and she hopes the Kansas frontier will offer her the freedom to follow that dream. In the nineteenth century, a young woman has few options in the East that don’t revolve around marriage and motherhood. Lillie is interested in neither. 

Cody rescues Lillie after a chance encounter in Independence, Missouri. Their destinies and desires become entwined as they face the perils of the untamed West. Despite their differences, they discover that love’s uncharted frontier is not for the weak in spirit or the faint of heart.

"Crossing the Wide Forever is a near-heroic love story set in an epic time, told with almost lyrical prose. Words on the page will carry the reader, along with the main characters, back into history and into adventure. It’s a tale that’s easy to read, with enchanting main characters, despicable villains, and supportive friendships, producing a fascinating account of passion and adventure." –Lambda Literary Review

February 1862. The War Between the States has been raging for nearly a year with no end in sight. Philadelphia socialite Wilhelmina Fredericks is safe from the war’s clutches, yet she feels compelled to do her part to bring the madness to an end. Accordingly, she disguises herself as a man, takes up arms, and heads South to join the fight. What could possibly go wrong?

Clara Summers’s father and older brother are serving in the Confederate army. Forced to look after her two younger brothers as well as the small Tennessee farm the family depends on for its livelihood, Clara has no time for or interest in love. Then she meets a handsome Union soldier named Wil Fredericks, and her loyalty to both her family and the Southern cause is put to the test.

It is 1944, and vast armies drive each other back and forth over blood-drenched Europe. 

In the midst of it, two radically different women meet, one a Russian speaking American on a failed diplomatic mission and the other a Soviet sniper. The American, fleeing a sordid past worthy of Dostoyevsky, has murder in her heart but has injured no man. The other, a once-saintly believer, has killed a hundred of them for Stalin. Their politics are worlds apart, but a reckless drunken kiss has tied them together, through church and trench, incense and the smoke of battle. If they survive the war, can they survive the peace?

Abigail Eliot is a brilliant naturalist whose entire life is dedicated to her work. When she meets an earnest doctor, Norah Stratton who’s new to San Francisco, they start an unlikely friendship. When the 1906 earthquake and fire strike, they’re both caught up in the event in very different ways. Will their tentative connection turn to a lasting love or will San Francisco’s great tragedy drive them apart?

Socialite Elizabeth Carlton impulsively joins the Women’s Army Corps to escape love’s disappointments and her father’s attempts to control her life. Still, she has never been one to accept discipline imposed by others—not even someone as intriguing as her new sergeant. 

Sergeant Gale Rains is accustomed to challenges, but she’s never had a recruit quite like this one. Rains surrendered much of her Sioux heritage to the Army to escape the hardships and pain of her youth. Now a drill instructor, her calm, steady manner and firm hand have molded women from all walks of life into WACs. But not one of them has ever touched her. Why should this spoiled party girl be any different?

With the whole world at war, victory is never certain as two women wage their own battles of will and desire.

Royal Duval is the pride of her grandfather, Duke, from whom she learned all about faith, ambition, and women. After her father passed, Royal inherited his part of the family business: running bootleg whiskey. The back roads of Georgia had been perfect for the dissemination of the much sought after illegal elixir until the local Baptist minister, Abraham Porter, decided to make prohibition his mission, and Royal the target of his evangelical wrath.

Lovey Porter, Abraham's daughter, is the living embodiment of chaste beauty, until she meets the charmingly handsome Royal Duval. Their growing attraction for each other challenges every belief that Lovey holds dear and calls into question every truth she felt sure was absolute. Even if she must defy her father, in the end, Lovey has to find her own path to faith and love. She alone must decide whether that path leads to Royal.

Evelyn Hopkins leaves everything she knows and heads to London at the height of the Roaring Twenties, intent upon living her life to the fullest. But will the dark cloud of the Great War keep her from happiness and love?

Edward Hopkins returned from the war, but he is a shadow of his former self, broken by his experiences. His sister makes him a promise: to live her life well enough for both of them. London is a colorful world of jazz, fashion, and opportunities for lust and romance at every turn. When Evelyn meets handsome, eccentric Jos—with her butch style and gentle manner—she knows true attraction for the first time. But can love sustain them through tragedy and carry Evelyn into a new life she can be proud of?

Chicago, the Roaring Twenties. Cecilia Mills is new to town and struggling to survive. Her world is turned upside down when she falls for gangster Franky Greco's moll Nell Prescott. Working at The Orpheus dance hall thanks to Nell, Cecilia becomes known as CeeCee and rubs elbows with gangsters and the city's elite, and she and Nell hide their affair from Greco.

Patrick Sheridan is fresh out of prison and bent on revenge, with Greco in the crosshairs. He gets a job as CeeCee's bodyguard, and despite her infatuation with Nell, love blossoms between CeeCee and Sheridan. When Sheridan sees his chance, thanks to a disillusioned cop seeking his own revenge, he must choose where his loyalties lie as CeeCee and Nell are caught in the middle.

Menage m/f/f.

Kerry O'Shea and Beth Hammond have plans for the future. Beth dreams of becoming a doctor and helping the poor citizens of San Francisco. More than anything, Kerry wants them to have a home of their own, but she is committed to helping Beth make her dream come true. Kerry makes a fateful decision that could have dire consequences. Can they both have what they want, or will they lose everything, including their love for each other?

Times are tough for sixteen-year-old Stick McLaughlin, running from a trumped up arson charge and hiding among hobos in 1918 Boston. Denied the companionship and support of lifelong soul mate Ellie, Stick edges her way through prison as "Mac," only to be thrust alone and wide-eyed into the very definitely Roaring Twenties. She swallows what's left of her pride through the final year of her sentenceserving as maid to a wealthy familybut stockpiles many invaluable lessons about rapidly-changing life in 1924.

Confrontations with bootleggers and a particularly enthralling flapper go a long way toward molding a strong, confident, clever "Mac," who hits the streets with a gang of her own, determined to claim the good life she deserves by beating the corrupt system and Boston's ethnic mobs at their own game.

Little does she know that the lost love she's mourned for years is closer than she thinks. But have time and circumstance conspired against her once and for all?

A diverse cast of lesbian, bi, and trans women, on both sides of the bars and through the centuries, find life-changing moments of love, hope, fear, excitement, passion, desperation, and inspiration.

Prison. The very word sends shivers of fear through the soul. A place of gloom and shadows, where freedom is taken, humanity is lost. A place of cruelty and pain, of claustrophobia, soul-searching, and waiting. A place where guilt and innocence fade away, identity is transformed, and the voice that cries in the darkness is no longer heard. One aspect of human existence that has endured through the centuries: incarceration, implied guilt, punishment.

But when all is lost, so much can be gained. It is in prison that the colors of freedom become sharper and brighter, more alluring because they are distant. It is here that impossible relationships become reasonable, that hopes are kindled by a word or a glance. It is where senses are heightened, as alert to danger as to love, to fear as to passion. It is where everything is at once ordered and disordered—and queer is only relative.

What's a poor pirate to do? Stevie has never met anyone quite like Kate, her not-so-helpless captive. Too bad the bold buccaneer swore an oath to preserve the virtue of the lovely parson's daughteran oath Kate has no intention of letting Stevie keep. But Kate has a problem of her own: the gorgeous Lady Isabella, a wealthy aristocrat who is happy to use kidnapping and blackmail to get what she wantsand what she wants is Kate. Jane Austen was never like this!

Jacqueline "Jaq" Bergeron—New Orleanian, suffragist, freethinker—drove an ambulance on the battlefields of Europe during the Great War. She returns home and finds herself isolated in rural East Texas, keeping house for her war-hero husband as she awaits his promised divorce and plans her escape. But then she meets Molly.

Molly Russell lives for her music, which sustains her as she cares for her son and husband, and suffers her mother-in-law. When she meets Jaq, a world she never imagined opens to hera world entirely out of reach.

With the storm of war still raging in Europe and other battles to be fought at home, can two women bound by the land and family ties find the freedom to love and build a life together?

Will the masked outlaw who stole Lucia's locket also claim her heart?

When Miss Lucia Foxe is robbed by a band of shadowy highwaymen, she does not realize this frightening event will change her life forever. Her brave quest to retrieve her stolen locket brings her into close contact with the thieves and their dashing and fearless masked leader, Len Hawkins. But there is more to Len than meets the eye. Beneath the robber's mask lies a woman who, in her heart, is not really so very different from Lucia.

As their unlikely love grows against the backdrop of the poverty and violent protest of Regency England, Lucia learns how much more there is to the world than her upbringing has taught her. Len flirts with death every day, and eventually, an attempt at exacting revenge on her cruel father threatens to snatch her from Lucia's arms.

Will Len survive her encounter with death and avoid the retribution of the agents of justice? And can respectable gentlewoman Lucia love Len enough to sacrifice everything she knows?

When love enters Tranby Quirke's life in the form of a beautiful 19-year-old student, Lysette McDonald, she embarks on the most remarkable journey of all.

London: 1909. Thirty-four-year-old spinster and secret suffragette Tranby Quirke spends her days toiling in obscurity as a lecturer to modern women and spends her nights embarking on exotic foreign adventures—but only inside her head. Then love enters Tranby's life in the most unexpected of ways and her real life adventures take her on a journey beyond imagining.