Queer SF - November 2026
November 3, 2026
This Knight Topples Empires — Ry Herman
Genre: Fantasy, fairy tale retelling
Rep: Queer; non-binary MC
In this raucous, tongue-in-cheek fairy-tale retelling from the author of This Princess Kills Monsters, a knight embarks on an adventure to thwart an invasion, save the most beautiful woman in the world, and finally get away from their sisters.
Jules is tired of running low-stakes errands with their five magically mismatched sisters, whose skills include killing plants, inducing sneezing, and making smaller windows… slightly larger. Blessed with a poorly controlled ability to make flowers bloom, Jules longs for a mission where they can actually prove themself. And when the siblings stumble upon a rival kingdom’s plot to overthrow their royal family, Jules sees an opportunity.
What follows is a whirlwind of botched disguises, accidental heroics, talking animals with surprisingly strong opinions, and one very inconvenient crush on the most sought-after princess in the land. And through all this, Jules learns that happy endings are indeed possible, even if you’re not quite Prince Charming. A cozy yet epic retelling of a Romanian fairy tale, This Knight Topples Empires proves that the greatest victories of all are love and self-acceptance.
Link: Kobo
November 10, 2026
The Drakon King — Terry J. Benton-Walker
Genre: Romantasy
Rep: M/M
Queer, Black, and sexy as hell, The Drakon King is romantasy at its best: A forbidden love story between princes in the court of a cruel king and an edge-of-your-seat tale of missing dragons, ruthless betrayals, and stolen hearts.
Two princes, born to a world at war.
Heir to a kingdom built on lies and stolen magic, Prince Reverie has one goal: avoid the crown. Raised by a cruel and violent king, Reverie’s real life begins after curfew—bottle service, masked revelries, top-shelf highs, and anonymous rooftop liaisons. But when his king plots to seize dwindling majikal resources from the Drakon King, Reverie hits his limit—he casts aside his royal obligations and gets the hell outta town. Better a free fugitive than a tortured captive.
Heir to a kingdom banished into the sky, Prince Xandreth has one goal: find a missing friend. His brother, the Drakon King, stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that their people keep going missing, so Xandreth takes it upon himself to hunt down answers.
A meeting that will change them both.
Having abandoned their kingdoms, both princes end up stranded in the dangerous and bewitching Wraithwood, and out of desperation, agree to help each other and then go their separate ways.
A love that will save their world.
But when a myth as old as the world—a bird on fire in the belly of a massive volcano—is whispered from Human lips to Drakon ears, Reverie and Xandreth are suddenly at the heart of a crisis so much bigger than a missing friend or even freedom.
If they can’t come together, the world itself may go up in flames.
Link: Tor
The Last Star in the Void — Melissa Caruso
Genre: Fantasy
Rep: Sapphic
Series: Book 3 of the Echo Archives
The brilliant conclusion to Melissa Caruso’s Echo Archives trilogy, a whip-smart adventure fantasy where a detective has to solve the greatest mystery of all—her own murder.
Kembral Thorne is back on the job. Everything is going great—she hasn’t been in mortal peril for months, her daughter is learning to crawl, and she’s thinking about getting serious with her girlfriend, cat burglar Rika Nonesuch. But then a simple mission goes wrong, and a mysterious Echo hires her for her most dangerous case yet.
This time, the murder Kembral must solve is her own.
Her first warning: Watch out above you. It won’t be her last. The cryptic messages give Kem an edge against her would-be murderer—but there’s more at stake than her own survival.
Rips in the very fabric of reality are spreading through the Echoes, and Kem’s blood is the only thing that can close them. A traitor among her allies is willing to kill to stop her. To save all the worlds, Kem must figure out who she can trust—and Rika must decide how much of her humanity she’ll sacrifice for the power to protect the woman she loves.
Link: Hachette
An Embodiment of Souls — Julia Laurel
Genre: Fantasy
Rep: Queer
As the daughter of a foreign ambassador, Rissa hoped living abroad would protect her from home’s puritanical customs where women are forbidden to walk at night or use magic except to support a necromancer’s dual identity.
Alek, the youngest prince of the Memric Isle, hasn’t yet taken his Second body. Fearing he’ll be accused of sin and his body claimed as a Second himself, Alek lives piously while studying abroad, even though he’s distracted by magic—and his handsome roommate, Gable.
When Alek meets Rissa by chance, his quiet life is thrown into chaos. One of Rissa’s fathers has been abducted, and Alek and Gable are witnesses. Alek and Rissa form a secret alliance to find her father and uncover the truth behind the conspiracy, risking life and freedom as they follow clues straight to the heart of the Memric Isle’s government.
Link: Kobo
Lavender and Hemlock — Lili Wilkinson
Genre: Fantasy
Rep: Sapphic
This cosy, atmospheric Sapphic multiverse fantasy spins a tale of love against all odds and across many worlds, for fans of The Ten Thousand Doors of January and V. E. Schwab’s Shades of Magic series.
Every morning, Tansy takes tea to her employer, Lady Aster. She goes on a walk along the cliffs, waving to the cat on her way. She dusts the elaborate glass globes full of strange and beautiful worlds that Lady Aster creates. She cleans their cottage, Oubliette. Every day, exactly the same.
Until, one afternoon, Tansy drops the globe containing a replica of the cottage, leaving a tiny fracture in the glass. And things begin to change.
She finds an injured knight from another world, Merit, sleeping in their pigsty. Merit was raised to be a monster, a servant of the terrible Unmaker who once terrorised her world—but after betraying a fellow knight, she escaped through a crack between places and found herself in the Oubliette.
There’s a reason every day in the Oubliette is identical; that Tansy can’t remember anything about her life before she joined Lady Aster's service. As she and Merit begin to explore the many worlds outside the Oubliette, they realise one story unites them the trail of war, violence and destruction left by the Unmaker, who they fear will one day return. And—however unwittingly—Tansy and Merit have opened the door.
The crack in the Oubliette was only the beginning. Soon, as the Unmaker’s story becomes increasingly ensnared with their own, both Tansy and Merit will have to choose: are they who they were born to be, or the people they’ve become to each other?
Link: Amazon
November 17, 2026
Universe of Grace — Rachel Calnek-Sugin
Genre: Magical realism
Rep: Queer
A dazzling, kaleidoscopic debut novel about the life of a precocious girl in Philadelphia trying to figure out who—or what—she is.
One afternoon, on a visit to the Bronx Zoo, a jaguar tells six-year-old Grace Goldberg-Li she isn’t human. Not that this comes as a total surprise. Her life looks normal, but no one else, not even her beloved sister, seems to be experiencing things as brightly and painfully as she does. As she approaches adolescence, Grace begins to think that she might be an alien. Maybe this would explain the urge to steal every beautiful object she can find, or the peculiar voice that’s started issuing apocalyptic warnings inside her head.
In adulthood, Grace still can’t figure it out. Is it the world that’s crazy and falling apart? Or is it her? She will attempt, over and over, to remake herself and find her place in it. She will fall recklessly in love with a gorgeous doctoral student; she will live as a tree in a backyard during the pandemic; she will become the best employee that Wendy’s has ever seen; she will travel to the ends of the earth and keep going.
Moving, imaginative, and endlessly surprising, Universe of Grace is at once a tender family portrait, a queer love story, and an epic quest for self-discovery in a world that’s uncertain and wondrous in equal measure. Covering the span of a single life and everything it touches, Universe of Grace shows us that we are each more interconnected and vast than we can ever know.
Link: Kobo
All the Beastly Things — Eilish Quinn
Genre: Post-apocalyptic, literary
Rep: Sapphic
In a post-apocalyptic matriarchy that has erased men and capitalism, a young novitiate destined for greatness faces a crisis of faith when her best friend begins receiving mysterious visions of an archangel—setting her on a path to choose between spiritual purity and human desire.
The year is 2171, and the Earth is not what it once was. The natural world reigns supreme, wild and ungovernable, after a series of wasting plagues and unmitigated climate disasters, the twin coups of fascism and AI, and a final, catastrophic nuclear fallout. Small monastic communities have emerged from the carnage—self-sufficient, female-only religious utopias governed by a strict codex and surrounded by walls to keep the wilds at bay. The new world is harmonious, and blissfully free from structures of oppression such as hierarchy, capitalism, and time.
Seventeen-year-old Igraine has never known life beyond the cloistered walls of the Field or seen a human male. Brilliant and devout, she spends her days in the gardens and scriptorium beside her closest companion, Ophelia. Their studies will culminate in twin posts at the Lunar Abbey—a gothic cathedral on the Moon reserved for the most venerated Sisters.
Their futures fracture when Ophelia begins receiving visions of a mysterious, alluring, and damningly masculine archangel. As doubt spreads and rumors surface about the Order’s darker forces, the girls venture beyond the convent’s walls and into the wilderness—while navigating the volatility of their deepening bond.
When Igraine’s formidable mentor, Sister Agathe, takes a romantic interest in her, devotion blurs into jealousy and illicit desire. In the aftermath, Igraine must confront her unraveling faith in a system that demands her complete surrender.
Link: Kobo