Read Between the Lines is a sapphic You’ve Got Mail, and it works because Rachel Lacey stacked three things. Rosie Taft runs her late mother’s bookshop in Manhattan. Jane Breslin works for her family’s property company by day and writes lesbian romance as “Brie” by night. They have been flirting on Twitter for two years — Rosie as a devoted reader, Jane as the author — and neither knows who the other is. Then Jane’s family terminates the bookshop’s lease.
Three axes, and here is the honest state of each.
Bookshops are common. The other two are not. Sapphic romance has plenty of bookshops. What it does not have is the mutual anonymity — two people talking for years without knowing who they are talking to — and it especially does not have a reader falling for the author she has been reading. We looked hard. That combination appears to be unique to this book in sapphic romance.
The hidden-identity trope is mostly somewhere else. Catfish plots, secret-identity comedies and You’ve Got Mail retellings are all over male-female and male-male romance. The one book we found that matched Read Between the Lines almost beat for beat — a reader emailing an author anonymously — turned out to be a heterosexual romance. Sapphic romance solves the strangers-to-lovers problem with fake dating and hometown reunions instead.
And the fanfiction angle does not pan out. Searching for sapphic books connected to fanfiction gets you novels that began as fanfiction and were then filed off — a fact about the book’s history, not about anything happening inside it. There is no sapphic equivalent of the fandom-community romance where two people know each other only by username.
So this is a list of nine books, each of which does one or two of the three well. It is shorter than our other guides because padding it would mean recommending books that do not fit.
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All 9 Books at a Glance
| Book | Bookish setting | Hidden online identity | Author-reader | Heat |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Read Between the Lines (the original) | Manhattan bookshop | Two years, no names | Reader and her favourite author | Open door |
| No Rings Attached | Bookstore manager | No | No | Open door |
| The Fiancée Farce | Inherited bookshop | A borrowed photograph | Publishing heiress | Open door, high |
| Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date | No | No | A working novelist | Open door |
| The Brutal Truth | No | An anonymous blog | Writer and media mogul | Open door, late |
| Wrong Number, Right Woman | No | Text-first, real names | No | Open door, light |
| Not in the Plan | A coffee shop | No | Writer and her material | Low, 2 of 5 |
| Delilah Green Doesn’t Care | The town bookshop | No | No | Open door |
| The Fall That Saved Us | A bookshop sanctuary | No | No | Open door |
| Kiss Her Once for Me | No | A concealed shared night | A stalled cartoonist | Open door |
1. No Rings Attached by Rachel Lacey
Lia Harris manages a bookstore in New York and has been telling her mother about a girlfriend who does not exist. Her brother’s wedding in London is three weeks away. A friend produces Grace Poston, and a weekend of pretending turns into a rather longer trip.
Why a Read Between the Lines reader wants it: It is the direct sequel — Ms. Right book two, same world, same author, another bookseller lead. If what you want is simply the next Rachel Lacey, this is it, and it is the highest-rated book in the series.
How it differs: Fake dating rather than mistaken identity. Nobody is hiding who they are, so the specific dread of Read Between the Lines — knowing something the other person does not — is gone. And there is no author character.
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2. The Fiancée Farce by Alexandria Bellefleur
Tansy Adams runs the bookshop she inherited from her father and invented a girlfriend using a romance novel’s cover model. Gemma van Dalen, the model, is heir to Van Dalen Publishing and needs a wife to satisfy her grandfather’s will.
Why a Read Between the Lines reader wants it: A bookshop owner, a publishing dynasty, and a relationship that begins with one woman using a stranger’s picture as a person. That last part is the closest anyone else gets to Rosie falling for a writer she has only met as a name.
How it differs: The deception runs one way and gets resolved almost immediately once Gemma appears. There is no anonymous correspondence, no two years of talking to someone you have never seen, and the heat is higher.
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3. Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date by Ashley Herring Blake
Iris Kelly writes romance novels and does not believe in them. After a catastrophic one-night stand with an anxious actress called Stevie, the two agree to fake-date so Stevie can prove something to her theatre company and Iris can research a book she cannot start.
Why a Read Between the Lines reader wants it: A working romance novelist as a lead, with the writing life — deadlines, doubt, the gap between what you produce and what you believe — treated as a real subject rather than a job title. That is the half of Jane Breslin’s story most books skip.
How it differs: No bookshop and no online element. Stevie is not Iris’s reader, so the fan-and-creator charge that powers Read Between the Lines is entirely absent.
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4. The Brutal Truth by Lee Winter
Maddie Grey is an Australian crime reporter drowning in New York, who writes an anonymous confessional blog nobody knows is hers. Elena Bartell is the media mogul who buys her paper. They agree to tell each other only the truth.
Why a Read Between the Lines reader wants it: The hidden second identity is the engine, exactly as it is in Read Between the Lines: one woman is publishing under a name the other does not connect to her, and the reveal is the thing the whole book is walking towards. Add a media empire and you have most of the ingredients.
How it differs: A blog, not novels, and the person reading it is not the love interest. The power imbalance is a boss and an employee rather than a writer and her reader, and the tone is far colder.
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5. Wrong Number, Right Woman by Jae
Denny is a butch cashier in her forties raising her niece. Eliza texts the wrong number asking a friend for dating advice, and Denny answers. They build the whole thing over messages before they ever stand in the same room.
Why a Read Between the Lines reader wants it: A relationship that exists entirely in text before it exists anywhere else, which is the shape of Rosie and Brie’s two years on the internet. Jae is very good on the particular intimacy of typing things you would not say out loud.
How it differs: Nobody is hiding anything. They use their real names from the first message, so there is no identity to reveal and no dread. No bookshop, no author. It is a gentler book than you are expecting.
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6. Not in the Plan by Dana Hawkins
Mack is a New York writer with a stalled book who moves to Seattle and starts working in Charlie’s coffee shop every day. Then she starts putting Charlie’s life into the manuscript without asking.
Why a Read Between the Lines reader wants it: It gets at the other half of the author-reader problem: what happens when a writer takes a real person and turns them into material. Rosie loved Brie’s books before she knew Jane wrote them; here the question is what a reader owes and what a writer takes.
How it differs: A coffee shop, not a bookshop, and no online element at all. It is also low heat — a two out of five — and a lot of readers never quite believed the central relationship.
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7. Delilah Green Doesn’t Care by Ashley Herring Blake
Delilah Green, a photographer, comes back to Bright Falls to shoot her estranged stepsister’s wedding and falls for Claire Sutherland — who runs the town bookshop and is raising an eight-year-old.
Why a Read Between the Lines reader wants it: Claire’s bookshop is the warmest bookshop in contemporary sapphic romance, and it stays the centre of gravity for the whole trilogy. If the setting was what you fell for in Read Between the Lines, this is where to go.
How it differs: No online element, no author character, no hidden identity. This is a small-town romantic comedy about family, and the bookshop is a place rather than a plot.
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8. The Fall That Saved Us by Tamara Jerée
Cassiel walked away from a family of demon hunters and now runs a small bookshop. Avitue is the succubus sent to collect her soul, who does not.
Why a Read Between the Lines reader wants it: The bookshop as sanctuary — a woman who has built a quiet life out of shelves and wants to be left alone in it. It is the most atmospheric bookshop on this list, and the book is doing serious work on religious trauma underneath the romance.
How it differs: Paranormal rather than contemporary, with no online element and no author-reader dynamic at all. Content note: religious trauma and familial abuse are central. There is no Libro.fm edition.
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9. Kiss Her Once for Me by Alison Cochrun
Ellie Oliver used to draw graphic novels and now cannot. Broke, she agrees to fake an engagement to her coffee-shop boss for half his inheritance, and goes home with him for Christmas — where his sister Jack turns out to be the woman she spent one perfect night with a year earlier.
Why a Read Between the Lines reader wants it: A creative whose work is the wound, and a relationship built on one person knowing something the other does not. The Christmas-house farce has the same escalating-lie comedy as Jane’s double life.
How it differs: Comics rather than novels, and the concealment is about a shared past rather than an assumed name. No bookshop, and nothing happens online.
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If You Only Read One
For more of the same: No Rings Attached. Literally the next book in the series, another bookseller, and the best-reviewed of the three.
For the hidden identity: The Brutal Truth. A woman publishing anonymously, a reveal the whole book leans towards, and a slow burn worth the wait.
For the bookshop: Delilah Green Doesn’t Care, or The Fall That Saved Us if you want the shelves to feel like a refuge rather than a business.
For the writing life: Iris Kelly Doesn’t Date, which is funnier, or Not in the Plan, which is more uncomfortable about what writers take.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there another sapphic You’ve Got Mail?
Not that we could verify. The closest is Telling Lies Online by Miranda MacLeod, a 2016 self-published novel in which a scientist ends up posing as a male colleague on a dating site. It is the purest identity-deception plot we found in sapphic romance, but it is an older indie title with very little critical footprint, so we have left it off the list proper rather than recommend a book we cannot vouch for.
Which of these actually has an anonymous online relationship?
Only The Brutal Truth, and only halfway — Maddie writes an anonymous blog, but the woman she falls for is not the reader of it. Wrong Number, Right Woman looks like a match and is not: the two women exchange real names in the first message, so there is nothing to reveal.
Are there other books in the Ms. Right series?
Read Between the Lines is book one and No Rings Attached is book two. Both stand alone; the connection is the friend group rather than the couple.
Which of these is the closest on tone?
No Rings Attached and The Fiancée Farce. Both are warm, funny, open-door contemporaries with bookish leads. The Brutal Truth is colder and slower; The Fall That Saved Us is a different genre entirely.
What if none of these is quite right?
Tell us the book, not the trope. Our Books Like directory takes a title and routes you to the closest read-alike list we have — and if we have not written that one yet, it points you at the trope pages that get nearest and records what you searched for, so it gets built next.
Looking for read-alikes for a different book? Browse the full Books Like directory — search any sapphic title and we will point you at the closest match we have.