As a lesbian who has always been fascinated by the deep sea (so much so, I have a Goodreads shelf titled ‘weird ocean stuff’), it is particularly pleasing to me to see so many releases merging the two. I recently read and reviewed The Jellyfish Problem by Tessa Yang for the Lesbrary, and it got me thinking about some of the other sapphic sea books I have read and love.
The most obvious, of course, is Our Wives Under the Sea by Julia Armfield. I think you would be hard-pressed not to find someone who has read this one at this point, but in case you haven’t, we follow two wives, Miri and Leah, as the latter returns from a deep sea voyage and things are not quite the same. It is a story about grief and losing the people you love, and it made me tear up at the end! It’s relatively short, but more literary than some of the others on this list. I definitely recommend it if you are yet to pick it up. Armfield’s more recent book Private Rites, a loose King Lear retelling, is also 1) sapphic and 2) heavily features water. I’m sensing a pattern here…
Another which I personally would consider a classic, though I don’t see it recommended as often anymore, is Into the Drowning Deep by Mira Grant. Whilst the romance in this one is not at the forefront compared to others, it is a sweet touch in between the viscous sharp teeth of the merfolk lurking in the depths of this one. A delightful twist on the mermaid genre, and another one of my favourites!
If you are interested in space and the frozen water planets, you could check out Landlocked in Foreign Skin by Drew Huff. Content warnings for this one, it is definitely one of the more gruesome books on this list, with lobotomies and homophobia. We follow two main characters: The Fisherman, an alien kidnapped from the depths of the waters on their home planet, with the ability to shift their body to match their environment, and Dame Isobel, the Fisherman’s captor who is fascinated by them in multiple ways. At under 200 pages, it’s another short and snappy novella—and it has a gorgeous cover too.
There are more books of course: This Gilded Abyss by Rebecca Thorne, Weird Fishes by Rae Mariz, and Merciless Waters by Rae Knowles, to name a few. Selfishly, I hope this wave (ha!) of deep sea sapphic themed stories continues so I can keep curating lists just like this.
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