My top six books of the year! A lot of Gunmetal Olympus titles, but otherwise an excellent thriller in Killer Potential and sci-fi horror in A Mask for the Sun. Probably the one that’s most accessible is A Rotten Girl, a literary satire about a trans lesbian who aims for commercial success by writing M/M pandering to straight women… while pretending to be a gay man. It’s great and I recommend it to everyone.

The Zeus Constant is an incredible accomplishment, being Callisto’s first novel, with breadth, depth, and tragedy. Flower of the Underworld is a bit like a romantasy if it’s incredibly twisted, and Pink Diamond is a cyberpunk noir about a butch detective working in the glittering, corrupt city of Elysium.

Happily, a lot of my top reads of the year (or otherwise my picks for the categories) won the Transfeminine Review Reader’s Choice Awards: A Rotten Girl, Song of the Dryads, Machines of Consent, Trans/Rad/Fem, Keeping the Peace, Ranked Competitive Breast Growth, and Naomi Kanakia’s Woman of Letters. My author picks that won include our very own Callisto Khan, Ana Valens, and Talia Bhatt. Congratulations all around! Memory of Olympus was also technically shortlisted for Outstanding Collection/Anthology, coming in third in votes, which was nice.

On the writing side, we put out Memory of Olympus and an AU short story “The Maw of Spring” (it’s prey dollfic, be warned), and welcomed Callisto Khan to the Maria Ying team. 2026 looks pretty exciting so far with what we’ve got lined up, starting with The Persephone Effect!

The Transfeminine Review Reader’s Choice Award was begun last year when Beth, who runs the website, noticed there isn’t really any sort of transfem-specialized award. I think it’s very cool, and here are my nominations for 2025 (you can nominate up to 3 in each category). Voting is open now.

• Best Transfeminine Fiction
  • A Rotten Girl by Jemma Topaz (writing as J. Ursula Topaz)
  • The Zeus Constant by Callisto Khan
  • A Sea of Silence by Kay F. Atkinson
• Best Transfeminine Nonfiction
  • Trans/Rad/Fem by Talia Bhatt
• Best Transfeminine Debut
  • Flower of the Underworld by Cirice Gray
  • Woodworking by Emily St. James
  • The Zeus Constant by Callisto Khan

Lesser Hungers is Rien Gray’s first foray into horror coming out this November, and I’ve always enjoyed their romantic suspense and Arthuriana, so I’m pretty intrigued by this. Tris Husband’s Keeping the Peace is meantime homage to classic noir, retold through the lens of futuristic Greek mythology. Her first, The Pink Diamond, was excellent; the combination of noir, sci-fi, and hard-bitten lesbian detective is potent and I highly recommend it. Violent, smoldering, sexy and unapologetically lesbian.

Zakharuk’s debut, Imago, is this delicious meeting of Mieville’s Bas-Lag world (or Vita Nostra, if you’re familiar) and literary lesbian monsterfucking that I haven’t seen anywhere else. So while information on Appetite is scarce, I know I’ll read whatever she puts out. Meantime Atkinson’s Fleet and Fabricant series is transfem sci-fi horror of the kind that trade publishing is just not putting out: expansive, visceral, and fresh. As soon as the preorder for Unlimited Combat Dolls went up, I knew I had to hit buy.

tl;dr The Swords and Sapphics podcast is run by two white cis women, Rachel Bowdler (also writes under Bryony Rosehurst and Bonnie Woods) and Ivy H. Marikova, who decided to accuse me of faking my race and then ejected every trans woman from their book sale and Discord server for some reason.

Recently on Bluesky I came across an Itch.io book bundle (essentially a sort of group book promotion) titled “The Ultimate Swords and Sapphics Bundle”. Since the bundle includes a few writers I knew, I was curious and clicked through, to quickly find out that the supposed “sapphic” bundle includes a remarkable number of books that are, uh, about women fucking men. Okay then. I vagueposted, “I really don’t think F/M/F books are sapphic, sorry.” I mean, do we consider harem isekai shows to be “sapphic”? It’s got one man in a relationship with 5-10 women (who may or may not be consenting) and sometimes the girls kiss. Sapphic, no? Incidentally, JK Rowling claimed Dumbledore is gay, is Harry Potter a queer series after all? Joanne, the secret agent of woke, the true ally of LGBTQIA+++! She even deigned to include characters of color, you know, like the Asian girl named Ching Chong and a Black character named well… uh. Joanne, no doubt, “refuses to be labeled” as anything but someone who adores the marginalized.

At the risk of sounding like a breathless publicist, the most apt description I can think of for A Rotten Girl is that it’s sizzling and topical. Did you enjoy Yellowface and its take on the commodification of identity in publishing? Would you like something like that except from a transfeminine perspective? Try this!

Because this book deals with a trans woman writer, her circumstances are a little less glamorous than what’s in Yellowface: more along the line of small presses than big trade publishing, expensive writing workshops, and six-figure deals. Pearl Camellia, a litfic author, has her debut put out by a micropress. The book sinks, and the publisher not soon after.

Everyone’s doing it, so here are mine.

A spread of genres: Seventh Veil is the biggest title on here, being a Moreno-Garcia book. It’s fantastic historical fiction blending Hollywood drama with the story of Salome, and while the author is known for constantly jumping genres I’d love more like this from her. It has the singular honor of being the sole book on this list with no lesbians (there are two hetero couples in there, both ending in tragedy).

Kimmy and A Sea of Silence have a good deal in common, both being transfeminine sci-fi horror where the trans woman protagonist is a robot (or turned into a robot); a great deal of body horror, of different flavors. Neither is a comfortable book, and both are incredible. Alyson is best known for her Dorley books (aka the up-and-coming dark academia forced feminization thriller that I think might end up really breaking out), but Kimmy is my favorite of her works to date.

Imago is very unique, written in the vein of China Mieville’s Bas-Lag books, combined with the particular strangeness of Vita Nostra. Dense and with lustrous prose, it’s the elevated monsterfucking lesbians you didn’t know you need; I don’t think there’s anything quite like it. Literary, surreal, dystopian; an amazing cocktail. Dystopian but differently so, The Brute of Greengrave offers a magical England where witches rule in a grim yet compelling matriarchy; here, too, there’s lesbian monsterfucking (and monster-on-monster fucking too).

The most realist contemporary titles of this list, Dulhaniyaa and Just Happy to Be Here are both written by desi trans women: the former taking place in Mumbai about an adult woman chafing against the constraints of heteropatriarchy, the latter taking place in America about a teenage trans girl struggling against not being able to go on HRT and entering a prestigious school for girls. Both are romantic, electrifying, and have happy endings, but neither is easily comfortable. These are books that confront, head-on, the actuality of what living under terrible conditions is like.

You can read my reviews of the following here: Kimmy, The Brute of Greengrave, Dulhaniyaa, and Just Happy to Be Here.