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November

Menewood by Nichola Griffith (audio)

Menewood is the sequel to Hild and if you liked the first book, you’ll most likely enjoy this one as well, although there are some content warnings for gory battle scenes and infant death. The story is packed with dense worldbuilding—a term not usually used for historic fiction—and has a meandering pace until things pick up in the last section. There’s more of the same casual, background same-sex relationships that we saw in Hild—in fact, I’d say they’re more present and significant in Menewood, though it takes quite a while in the book for that aspect to appear. If you aren’t already familiar with early Anglo-Saxon history, it may be best to approach this book as if it were an epic fantasy set in an unfamiliar world, and let it soak in as you read.

December (hey, Menewood is a VERY long book)

Nettle and Bone by T. Kingfisher (audio)

I'd call this more dark, bordering-on-horror than plain fantasy. This fairy-tale quest won the Hugo Award for best novel and was a finalist for a couple other major awards. No sapphic content, but a solid Kingfisher-style adventure with a heroine you want to root for.

Think of England by K.J. Charles (audio)
Wanted, A Gentleman by K.J. Charles (audio)

I've been working my way through Charles's backlist. These are a couple of her earlier gay historical romances. Both of them involve characters with marginalized ethnicities (Jewish in the first case, and Black in the second case) with a rather harshly unflinching look at the realistic prejudices of the times. The prejudices (including by central characters) do not go unchallenged, and the relationships are resolved satisfactorily without any hint of a "white savior" trope. Wanted, A Gentleman also has one of Charles’ favorite tropes (and one I love): an unreliable protagonist—but I’ll leave the specifics alone to avoid spoilers.

Learned by Heart by Emma Donoghue (audio)

A novelization of the schoolgirl romance between Anne Lister and Eliza Raine. As they say, there are no spoilers in history, and the sweet love story spun out in Donoghue’s always-elegant prose is inevitably tragic, with its hints of the story that might have happened.

Death Below Stairs by Jennifer Ashley (audio)

A historic mystery, set in the Victorian era. I picked this up because there's a later novella spin-off featuring a f/f couple. (At least one of the relevant characters is a continuing secondary character in the series.) Alas, the premise of the series, with a cook to an upper class family as the amateur detective, was hard to swallow—-at least as presented in this story. The protagonist spent so much time running around investigating, it’s impossible that she wouldn’t have been sacked the second day on the job. And the writing (though ok) wasn't strong enough to keep me hooked. There are hints of a series-arc involving a romance between the cook and a Man Who Is Not What He Seems. Other than the spin-off, I’m not likely to continue following the series but I have hopes to enjoy that one when I find time to read in print.

All audiobooks in this entry, though I got through quite a few, especially considering how long Menewood was.