Last Night at the Telegraph Club is San Francisco in 1954. Lily Hu is seventeen, Chinese American and good at maths, and the thing that makes a night out at a North Beach bar dangerous is not her feelings for Kathleen Miller — it is her father’s immigration papers. It won the National Book Award and holds 4.18 on Goodreads across 126,877 ratings, with a pacing complaint that even its starred reviews mention. Heat is 2 out of 5.
The thing to match on is the arithmetic, not the era. What Lo does better than almost anyone is show a teenager calculating what a relationship could cost people who are not her — a family’s citizenship, a father’s job, a community’s standing. Books that only supply the period detail do not scratch it. So this list is sorted by how seriously each book takes that calculation, and half of it is contemporary because some of the closest matches are.
Sapphic historical coming-of-age is thinner than sapphic historical fiction generally. There is a large and good shelf of adult historical novels — Waters, Highsmith, Donoghue — and very little about being a teenager in it. Learned by Heart and Sunburn are the two closest, and one is Regency England and the other is the 1990s. Nothing else we could find puts a queer girl of that age in a specific historical American city and takes the danger seriously.
Almost everything here is low heat, and that matches the source. Seven of the twelve sit at 2 out of 5 or below. Tipping the Velvet at 4 out of 5 is the outlier, and it is the one to know about if what you actually wanted was the adult version of the same world.
Three of these books do not end happily and two have no buy links for a format you might expect. Stone Butch Blues has no Bookshop.org listing and no audiobook, and Sunburn’s only Bookshop edition is a CD. Where a button is missing it is because we opened the product page and the format was wrong, not because we did not look.
This post contains affiliate links to Amazon, Bookshop.org and Libro.fm. If you buy through them we may earn a small commission, at no extra cost to you. Start with our full review of Last Night at the Telegraph Club, and see Books Like The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo for the adult historical shelf.
All 12 Books at a Glance
| Book | Setting | Age | What could take it away | A community | Heat | Goodreads |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Last Night at the Telegraph Club — Malinda Lo | 1954 San Francisco | Teenager | Family and the state | Yes, the club | 2/5 | 4.18 |
| Sunburn — Chloe Michelle Howarth | 1990s rural Ireland | Teenager | Village and family | No | Low | 4.05 |
| Learned by Heart — Emma Donoghue | 1805 York | Teenager | School and standing | No | 1/5 | Amazon 4.0 |
| Under the Udala Trees — Chinelo Okparanta | Nigeria, 1968 on | Teenager to adult | Mother and church | No | Low | 4.02 |
| Carol (The Price of Salt) — Patricia Highsmith | 1950s New York | Adult | Lawyers | No | 1/5 | 4.02 |
| Cantoras — Caro De Robertis | Uruguay, 1977 on | Adult | The dictatorship | Yes, the five of them | 3/5 | 4.37 |
| Stone Butch Blues — Leslie Feinberg | 1970s Buffalo | Teenager to adult | Police | Yes, the bars | 3/5 | 4.55 |
| Tipping the Velvet — Sarah Waters | Victorian England | Adult | Class and money | Yes | 4/5 | Amazon 4.3 |
| Forget Me Not — Alyson Derrick | Contemporary Pennsylvania | Teenager | Family and town | No | 2/5 | 4.23 |
| You Should See Me in a Crown — Leah Johnson | Contemporary Indiana | Teenager | Town and a forced outing | Late | 1/5 | 4.06 |
| Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating — Adiba Jaigirdar | Contemporary Dublin | Teenager | Family and community | No | 1/5 | 4.06 |
| Long Island Girls — Gabrielle Korn | Contemporary New York | Teenager to adult | Town | A music scene | Moderate | ~4.0 |
| The Gilda Stories — Jewelle Gomez | 1850 to the future | Teenager to immortal | Slavery, then everything | Yes, found family | 2/5 | 3.92 |
1. Sunburn by Chloe Michelle Howarth
Lucy is sixteen in a small Irish village in the 1990s, with a boyfriend everyone approves of and a best friend called Susannah she cannot stop thinking about. The village is the size of the whole world and everyone in it already knows what Lucy’s life is supposed to look like.
Why a Last Night at the Telegraph Club reader wants it: The closest match on this list and the one to read next. Same shape as Lily and Kath: a friendship tipping into something neither girl has a word for, in a place where being found out ends more than a romance. Howarth writes the pressure as ambient rather than dramatic, which is exactly what Lo does with the Red Scare.
How it differs: It is 1990s Ireland rather than 1950s San Francisco, and the threat is social rather than legal — nobody is going to be deported. The 4.05 average across more than 84,000 Goodreads ratings is high, but this is literary fiction with an ending that does not tie off. There is no Bookshop paperback; the only listing is a CD-audio edition.
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2. Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue
York, 1805. Eliza Raine, an orphaned heiress born in India, is sent to a boarding school where she is the only brown girl in the building. Anne Lister arrives, disruptive and magnetic, and is put in her room. It is based on the real Eliza Raine, and Donoghue knows how it ends.
Why a Last Night at the Telegraph Club reader wants it: A first love inside an institution, with a girl whose position is precarious for reasons that have nothing to do with who she loves. Like Lily, Eliza is doing the arithmetic of what she can risk against what her family standing can absorb, and Donoghue keeps the prose as restrained as Lo does.
How it differs: Read this part before you buy. Heat is 1 out of 5, largely closed-door and chaste, and the tone is elegy rather than romance — it is melancholy from the first page and it does not relent. Regency England, not mid-century America, and no community of other queer women anywhere in it. The site figure we can vouch for is a 4.0 average across more than 1,000 Amazon ratings.
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3. Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta
Ijeoma is sent away during the Nigerian civil war and falls in love with another displaced girl. Her mother does not beat her or throw her out. She opens a Bible and begins, patiently and daily, to teach her daughter out of herself.
Why a Last Night at the Telegraph Club reader wants it: The best book here on family pressure specifically. Lily’s parents are the real obstacle in Telegraph Club, and Okparanta writes the version where the pressure is love rather than cruelty, applied daily for years, which is far harder to resist and much harder to read.
How it differs: It is adult literary fiction with a slow, formal register and a 4.02 Goodreads average where almost a quarter of readers sit at three stars or below. There is no queer community to escape to — the isolation is total — and the scope runs across decades rather than a single year.
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4. Carol (The Price of Salt) by Patricia Highsmith
A young shopgirl in 1950s New York serves a woman buying a doll for her daughter and cannot stop thinking about her. Carol is wealthy, married, mid-divorce, and about to find out exactly what her husband’s lawyers will use against her.
Why a Last Night at the Telegraph Club reader wants it: The same decade, the same country, and the same understanding that the danger is administrative rather than dramatic — a lawyer, a private detective, a file. It was published in 1952 under a pseudonym for the reasons Lo spends a novel explaining, and at 4.02 across 88,746 Goodreads ratings it is still the reference point.
How it differs: Therese is nineteen but this is not a coming-of-age novel; there is no school, no family and no community. Heat is 1 out of 5. Where Lo gives you the Telegraph Club and the women in it, Highsmith gives you two people alone on a road trip being followed.
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5. Cantoras by Caro De Robertis
Five women find a stretch of coast in Uruguay during the dictatorship and return to it for thirty-five years. What they have with each other cannot be said aloud anywhere else in the country, so they build somewhere it can be.
Why a Last Night at the Telegraph Club reader wants it: For the community. The Telegraph Club itself — a room where the rules are suspended — is the thing readers remember, and Cantoras is a whole novel about building and keeping one. It won the Stonewall Award and holds 4.37 on Goodreads, the highest average on this list.
How it differs: These are adults, not teenagers, and the book spans thirty-five years rather than one. The state is an active danger rather than an atmosphere — people disappear — and there is no single couple to follow. Heat is 3 out of 5, higher than Lo.
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6. Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg
Jess Goldberg comes up butch in 1970s working-class Buffalo, through factory jobs, gay bars, police raids and a period of passing as a man. It is written as a life rather than a plot.
Why a Last Night at the Telegraph Club reader wants it: The bar is the same institution. Everything the Telegraph Club is — a room, a stage, a male impersonator, and a police force that can empty it whenever it wants — is here two decades later and written from the inside by someone who lived it. At 4.55 across 39,428 Goodreads ratings it is the highest-rated book on this page.
How it differs: Read this part before you buy. There is sustained on-page violence including sexual assault by police, and there is no happy ending. It is also about gender rather than sexuality for much of its length. There is no Bookshop listing and no audiobook.
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7. Tipping the Velvet by Sarah Waters
Nan Astley is an oyster girl in Whitstable until she sees a male impersonator on a music hall stage and follows her to London. What follows is a career, a fall, and several reinventions, told in the first person by a woman who is never the same person twice.
Why a Last Night at the Telegraph Club reader wants it: Lily and Kath go to the Telegraph Club to watch a male impersonator. This is the novel about being one. Waters writes the same charge of a woman in a suit on a stage and the same crowd of women who came specifically to see her, at 4 out of 5 heat rather than Lo’s 2.
How it differs: Victorian England, and a much longer, harder book — the middle section goes to genuinely bleak places that a YA reader will not be expecting. It is a coming of age but of an adult, and there is no family pressure at all; Nan leaves home in chapter three and never really goes back. We have a full guide to its read-alikes.
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8. Forget Me Not by Alyson Derrick
Stevie and Nora have been secretly together for two years in a small Pennsylvania town, planning the escape to California that will let them stop hiding. Then Stevie has an accident and loses the last two years, including Nora.
Why a Last Night at the Telegraph Club reader wants it: The best contemporary match on the family-and-town axis: two girls keeping a relationship secret because their families and their town are the actual risk, with the same careful accounting of who can be told what. Derrick is writing 2022 rather than 1954, and the constraints rhyme more than they should.
How it differs: The amnesia premise is a genre device Lo would never use, and it drives the second half. Heat is 2 out of 5 and behind closed doors. The 4.23 Goodreads average across 12,176 ratings is high, but this is contemporary YA with a hopeful ending rather than historical fiction with a hard one.
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9. You Should See Me in a Crown by Leah Johnson
Liz Lighty needs a scholarship, which in her Indiana town means running for prom queen. She is Black, poor, closeted and has a brother with sickle cell. Mack is new, and running against her.
Why a Last Night at the Telegraph Club reader wants it: Small-town scrutiny, a closeted heroine and a forced outing, which is the fear Lily carries through the whole of Telegraph Club made explicit. Johnson also matches Lo on how much of the danger is about a family’s standing rather than the girl’s own feelings.
How it differs: Contemporary, comic in register, and heat is 1 out of 5 — kisses only. It is a competition plot with a happy ending and a 4.06 Goodreads average that has more four-star ratings than five. There is no historical weight and no queer community until very late.
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10. Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating by Adiba Jaigirdar
Hani comes out as bisexual to her friends and is not believed, so she says she is dating Ishu — the other Bengali girl at their Dublin school, who agrees because she needs to be popular enough to be head girl.
Why a Last Night at the Telegraph Club reader wants it: For the specific thing Lo does with Lily’s parents and Chinatown: two girls navigating a white school, immigrant families and communities they do not want to lose. Jaigirdar takes the biphobia and the racism seriously rather than using them as texture.
How it differs: Contemporary Dublin, a fake-dating comedy structure, and heat at 1 out of 5 — the review calls it glimpses and kisses. The 4.06 Goodreads average across 36,303 ratings comes with seven recurring complaints about the third act. Nothing here is historical and nobody is in danger from the state.
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11. Long Island Girls by Gabrielle Korn
A coming of age on Long Island built around a first love, a music scene, and the pull between staying and getting out. Years later there is a reconnection, and neither woman is who she was.
Why a Last Night at the Telegraph Club reader wants it: For the ache of a first love that belongs to one specific place and one specific year, and for the version of the story where the girls grow up and have to look at it again. Korn writes desire inside a literary narrative, which is the register Lo works in too.
How it differs: It is contemporary and adult, so the family pressure is memory rather than a live threat, and the historical dimension is entirely absent. Heat is moderate. It is also new enough that the Goodreads average, around 4.0, rests on early ratings rather than a settled crowd — and the only Bookshop edition is a hardcover.
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12. The Gilda Stories by Jewelle Gomez
A girl escapes slavery in 1850s Louisiana and is taken in, and turned, by a woman who owns a brothel. The book then follows her across two hundred years of American life, from Reconstruction into a future she has to keep outrunning.
Why a Last Night at the Telegraph Club reader wants it: A Black lesbian coming of age that becomes a whole American history, and the only book here that shows the same decade Lily is living through from another vantage point entirely. Found family is the load-bearing structure, the way the Telegraph Club is for Lily.
How it differs: It is a vampire novel, episodic rather than continuous, and heat is 2 out of 5 — sensual rather than explicit. The 3.92 Goodreads average is pulled down by craft complaints that even sympathetic reviewers repeat. No audiobook edition exists.
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If You Only Read One
For the closest overall match: Sunburn. A friendship tipping into something else in a village that already knows what your life is meant to look like.
For the family pressure: Under the Udala Trees. A mother applying love rather than cruelty, daily, for years.
For the club itself: Stone Butch Blues or Cantoras. One is the bar and the raids; the other is a stretch of coast five women keep for themselves for thirty-five years.
For the adult version of the same world: Tipping the Velvet. A male impersonator on a stage and the women who came to watch her, at 4 out of 5.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is there a sequel to Last Night at the Telegraph Club?
Malinda Lo has written a companion novel, A Scatter of Light, set decades later and connected to the same family. It is a separate story rather than a continuation of Lily and Kath, and readers who wanted more of the 1950s tend to be the ones disappointed by it. We have not reviewed it yet.
Are there other sapphic novels about a queer teenager in a specific historical city?
Very few. There is a large adult historical shelf — Waters, Highsmith, Donoghue — and almost nothing about being that age inside it. Learned by Heart is 1805 York and Sunburn is 1990s Ireland, and those are the two closest. Nothing we could find puts a queer girl of Lily’s age in another historical American city and takes the legal danger as seriously.
Which of these are young adult?
Forget Me Not, You Should See Me in a Crown and Hani and Ishu’s Guide to Fake Dating are YA, like the source book. Sunburn and Learned by Heart are adult literary fiction about teenagers. Everything else on the list is adult.
Which of these do not end happily?
Learned by Heart is an elegy and ends bittersweet. Stone Butch Blues does not end happily in any conventional sense and contains sustained on-page violence including sexual assault by police. Carol ends open, and Cantoras and Under the Udala Trees are bittersweet. The YA titles all land hopefully.
Why do some entries have no paperback or audiobook button?
Because the edition does not exist or is not what it looks like. Stone Butch Blues has no Bookshop.org listing and no audiobook, Sunburn’s only Bookshop edition is a CD, The Gilda Stories has no audiobook, and Long Island Girls is hardcover only. Bookshop lists CD-audio and ebook editions next to paperbacks, so we open every product page and read the format field before adding a button.
Where do I find the rest of these guides?
The full directory is at Books Like…, with a search box that matches a book you have already read to the closest guide we have published.
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.