I have never read one. (Cishet male)
Most of Octavia Butler's books have a female protagonist. She did sci-fi and afrofuturism.
There are several by Ursula K Leguin if you like the genres. I think they're all in the middle of series, though, with the earlier books centering male characters.
Unhinged: Girl Flesh by May Leitz.
Hinged: Honey Girl by Morgan Rogers
Esoteric: This Is How You Lose The Time War by Maxwell Gladstone & Amal El-Mohtar
Spooky: Our Wives Under The Sea by Julia Armfield
Arty: The Drowning Girl by Caitlin R Kiernan
Sheesh, imagine reading books written by men
more like "meh", fuckin gottemI fucking love This is How You Lose the Time War
The prose is beautiful and there are some parts of the book that felt like they were written for me
If you want to read it I'd only recommend reading it and not listening via audio book. I recommended it to a friend that tried that and the formatting isn't the best for audio
Yeah it's great, I feel like that Sapphic
fatalism is missing from too many romances honestly.I skipped the audiobook myself, shame it's not great...
It might be okay if you've already read the book but it kinda makes sense the letters format isn't the best as audio :/
Which sucks because the epistolary format is one of my fav things about it too...
Just read this! Yes, the prose was beautiful and I found myself falling for both characters. Had a lot of trouble following the time travel elements but they were secondary anyway.
Dear you've barely read any books written by men in all the time I've known you
What about an enby protagonist?
I'll never stop singing the praises of the Monk and Robot books by Becky Chambers.
Second Becky Chambers. Her Wayfarer series has female protagonists iirc, and they are awesome reads.
The Gideon the Ninth series made it's rounds here a while back, I highly suggest it.
It was like a single fairly active thread, but it was enough for me to see and give it a shot!
A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine took home the 2020 Hugo Award. It is basically a sci-fi imperial court drama with all the murder and manipulation and scheming and unclear allegiances that entails.
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin is a multi-protagonist/perspective novel about a fictional team of people developing video games, one of whom is a woman.
Seconding Empire, it's a banger. The author is clearly a history nerd and cares deeply about the complex effects the imperial-periphery entanglement has on people.
Haha holy shit, a fucking Gabrielle Zevin poster no way! I liked her YA stuff when I was young.
Human Acts by Han Kang, though I am cheating. It has multiple protagonists, and is historical fiction surrounding the very real Gwang-Ju massacre. Depressing and written in a way that truly doesn't care about how you personally feel as long as it gets the point across.
No problem!
Definitely find a trigger warning list, SA, child killing, and grotesque depictions of festering bodies are used to try to truly get the point across. It's done well, but it is a ripping-off the mask sort of situation, laying the events bare and forcing the reader to sympathize with the plight of the pro-democracy protestors and trade unionists.
It has multiple protagonists
I thought about clarifying that this is not a problem but I didn't know how to get my point across.
Blood and Guts in High School by Kathy Acker
Tampa by Alissa Nutting
My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Ottessa Moshfegh
The Last September by Elizabeth Bowen
Most of Virginia Woolf's books
Manhunt by Gretchen Felker-Martin
There are a few places where the prose is a bit rougher than it needs to be (she needs to stop describing hair as "pin-straight" for instance), but otherwise a fresh, and incisive take on an otherwise tired genre. I really love the characters first and foremost. All of them are so fully realized and hurt each other in ways that stem from their own history and psychology. And the way the setting allows the true villain of the work to essentially be cisness at its most nakedly oppressive is brilliant stroke. She's also quite good at writing sex, which can't be underestimated. Really just an all around great book.
I actually just saw her in person touring for Cuckoo which, if you haven't read it yet, is another banger
ayooo who are you tho?I absolutely hated it to death the first time I tried, (guess why) but I've come around to it a lot after banging my head against it. I dig that it's pointedly about assimilationism. I would not have taken away that Martin is good at writing sex tho,
woes of being ace igLmao you fuckin SAW HER IRL??? That's awesome no fuckin way. I've been watching Cuckoo a few months, it's on my to-read list very soon!
- ayooo who are you tho?
Just your friendly neighborhood book nerd
Yeah ok but I have never met anyone who's read Manhunt before, how'd that happen?
my comrade in christ
I can still count on one hand the amount of times I've even personally witnessed another human who has read one of these. Where do they live and vibe?
But if you're ever in NYC we can grab a coffee or something!
one of the nicer things thats been said to me on bear websiteAlas, passportless
Seconding, in very different ways, both Acker and Felker-Martin. Read Acker if you want to see language pushed to its limits in order to express the full depth of misogyny and read Manhunt for a fun romp in a world where transmisogyny has survived the apocalypse.
Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckie sorta counts, but almost every character in that story is a woman.
Shards of Honor and Barrayar, both by Lois McMaster Bujold are some very good space opera with a female lead. The series continues after that for a lot more books mostly focused on her son which are also very good.
Unjust Depths by Madiha is an excellent gay communist lesbian serial web novel.
Robin Hobb is well regarded as one of the great fantasy authors and has some. Pretty sure it’s the live ship trilogy but it’s been a while so I could be wrong. It isn’t farseer.
My recommendations skew towards fantasy, rather than simply fiction:
The Water Outlaws, by S. L. Huang, is a queer retelling of Water Margin, which is one of the Four Classic Chinese Novels (and one of the earliest written works in Mandarin). In this version, the 108 bandits on Mount Liang who rebel against the Emperor are mostly queer women.
Black Water Sister, by Zen Cho, is about a closeted lesbian who, after finishing university, moves from America back to Malaysia, where the ghost of her dead grandmother embroils her in a conflict with a local deity and a corrupt land developer.
The City of Brass (and subsequently The Kingdom of Copper and The Empire of Gold), by S. A. Chakraborty, which is about a woman from 19th century Cairo getting pulled into an ancient conflict between warring factions of djinn, ifrit and marid.
The Adventures of Amina al-Sarafi, again by Shannon Chakraborty, about a middle-aged retired pirate legend in the 12th century who has to leave her daughter behind to hunt across the Indian Ocean for a girl from Aden who has been kidnapped by a Frankish mercenary.
The Daughters of Izdihar, by Hadeer Elsbai, is about a woman with the power to weave water, a power that is frowned upon the wider society. When her family arranges her marriage, she is sent to the city, and falls in with a group of radical feminists who are fighting for women to get the vote.
Markswoman and Mahimata by Rati Mehrotra is about Kyra, a woman in the Order of Kali who has been trained as a Markswoman, a fighter sworn to serve as the blade that keeps the peace. But more than peace, Kyra wishes to avenge her murdered family.
Give The Dark My Love and Bid My Soul Farewell, by Beth Revis, is about a young girl from a small town who leaves home on a scholarship to study medical alchemy. When a plague (potentially magical in origin) starts sweeping the nation, the wealthy med students are insulated from the danger. But Nedra's family lives where the sickness is ravaging, and she will stop at nothing to learn what she needs to find a cure. Even if that requires studying the forbidden magic of necromancy.
Seafire, Steeltide, and Stormbreak by Natalie Parker, which is about an all-lady crew of pirates fighting a rebellion against a cruel warlord who has control of the only known livable archipelago in a post-apocalyptic world.
A Thousand Steps Into the Night, by Traci Chee, about an innkeeper's daughter who struggles to embody the feminine ideals of domesticity and servitude, until she is cursed by a demon and sets off on a quest to find the cure.
Also by Traci Chee, the Sea of Ink and Gold trilogy is for a younger audience (as an educator I read a lot of stuff for a wide spread of ages) but I still recommend it, because it is an absolutely fantastic set of books that employs a little post-modernism to question, what is a book? In this trilogy, they live in a world with no writing, until the protagonist starts to unravel the mystery of the mysterious rectangular object that her father died to keep hidden and the world-shaping magic that is reading.
Sofi and the Bone Song, by Adrienne Tooley, is about a girl who is raised in a kingdom rife with magic, where in order to protect the artistic integrity of music from being automated by magic, only a select few are licensed to publicly perform. Sofi has trained her whole life to take over her father's position as the nation's only licensed lutist, but her dreams are snatched away at the last minute by a girl who has never played the lute before. Now Sofi is determined to expose this girl as a fraud who used magic to play music and steal her place; but to do this, she has to get close to her, and learn what it is that makes music worth playing.
Eight Will Fall, by Sarah Harian is more of an ensemble, but the lead is a woman. Eight criminals are sentenced to descend into darkness below to confront and defeat an ancient evil threatening their kingdom. If successful, they'll earn their freedom.
The Cold is in Her Bones, by Paternelle van Arsdale, is a story inspired by Medusa. Milla lived her whole life isolated on her family's farm, until a girl from the nearby village, Iris is sent to live with them. Back in the village, a demon is possessing girls and it seems no one is safe. But when Iris is taken, Milla must set out to find her, and break the demon's curse.
The Boneless Mercies, by April Genevieve Tucholke, is a retelling of Beowulf but with a band of women warriors hunting the mythical beast.
Katy Rose Pool's trilogy, There Will Come A Darkness, As The Shadow Rises, and Into The Dying Light is an ensemble, but one of the main characters (and most compelling), is the legendary assassin known as the Pale Hand of Death, because all of her victims are left with no marks of violence, only a pale handprint. This is more of a classic epic fantasy: prophecies about the end of the world, that just may implicate the Pale Hand. But she has her reasons for killing: without stealing the life from the living, the illness that plagues her sister can't be stopped. But despite choosing only those who the Pale Hand deems deserving of death, her sister is unable to accept that her life is prolonged at the expense of others.
These are just the ones I have handy, but I am always happy to recommend more (this goes for anyone out there, and not just for fantasy, I have a lot of recommendations for theory as well).
That's a lot of books. Thank you synopsis of each as well.
