This week’s category of the Sapphic Book Bingo features sapphic western novels.
For this square of your bingo card, read a sapphic book that is set in the Old West–the American frontier in the 19th century.
The main character might work on a ranch or in a rugged mining town or be a woman starting over in the West.
If you’re not a big fan of historical fiction, you could also read a contemporary western novel, e.g., a book set on a modern ranch.
15 sapphic Western novels
Below, you’ll find 15 recommended sapphic Western novels:
Backwards to Oregon by Jae
A single mother and a woman living as a man find love on the Oregon Trail in this best-selling sapphic historical romance.
Luke Hamilton has always been sure that she’d never marry. She accepted that she would spend her life alone when she chose to live her life disguised as a man.
After working in a brothel for three years, Nora Macauley has lost all illusions about love. She no longer hopes for a man who will sweep her off her feet and take her away to begin a new, respectable life.
But now they find themselves married and on the way to Oregon in a covered wagon, with two thousand miles ahead of them.
Available at:
Two of a Kind by T.B. Markinson & Miranda MacLeod
Maisie Sullivan is a hard-working marketing assistant from Milwaukee who wants nothing more than to earn a promotion and finally finish her college degree. But when she’s swept off her feet by a charming cowgirl while on a business trip to Las Vegas, she decides there’s no harm in having a little fun.
Drew Campbell is a no-nonsense Wyoming rancher with a talent for horse training. Her only goal in traveling to Las Vegas for a riding competition is to win enough money to pay off her family’s debts. But when a beautiful stranger catches her eye and then some, she figures she might as well let loose for a night on the town.
What takes place after that, neither can recall. But months after parting ways, when both their fortunes have fallen, they discover what happened in Vegas has followed them home. A quickie divorce will solve the problem, but each woman has something the other needs, and neither will budge until she gets her way.
They just want to get on with their lives, but will they end up falling in love with their wives?
Available at:
Cowboys and Kisses by Karin Kallmaker
A one-way stage ticket to the frontier leaves a young woman penniless and alone in Long Grass, Wyoming. With no other hope than to survive another day, she takes up the only profession open to her. Years later she encounters a one-of-a-kind cowboy she can love, and her first taste of pleasure – and happiness.
Cowboys, however, are born to wander, and their kisses are as brief as the lives of young women without family or means. Accepting that her days will be numbered too few, Darlin’ escapes into her scribblings where her dreams of freedom can soar over the limitless prairie.
When she recognizes her own truth and a chance for love in the longing gaze of a townswoman, will she finally find kisses that she can trust?
Available at:
Bloomtown by Ally North
June 1852. When Abby Proctor is kidnapped from a train in the middle of the desert halfway to her new life in California, she makes a promise to herself—she will escape. Abby is leaving Iowa and all its oppressions behind for a reason, and she refuses to be someone’s prisoner again. Especially when that someone is the infamous female outlaw Joey “JT London” Taylor—Abby’s brash, brooding, and inconveniently beautiful captor.
As Abby plots her escape, she stumbles upon a larger conspiracy behind her kidnapping—a complicated revelation considering her growing feelings for Joey, who might not be the ruthless criminal everyone believes her to be. Suddenly Abby doesn’t want to go back to the confines of her religious father or her suffocating husband.
Then Abby realizes it’s all connected—her kidnapping, the secrets she left behind in Iowa, even her plans in California—and she must decide between returning to a life of obedience and unhappiness or trusting an enigmatic outlaw bound for the gallows.
Available at:
They Ain’t Proper by M.B. Guel
1880s, The Wild West.
An easy, solitary life on the outskirts of Ghosthallow is all Lou Ramirez wants. They want to buy some house plans, build a home, and live their quiet life far from townsfolk’s prying eyes. But somehow instead of house plans, a housewife is delivered to their door.
Clementine Castellanos desperately needs a way out from under her family debt, and it seems as though selling her services as a wife is the only way to do it. Expecting a rough, harsh man to be her new husband, Clementine is pleasantly surprised to instead be dropped off at the ranch of an equally surprised Lou.
Lou would rather Clementine leave them to their lonely existence, but Clementine is too charmed by the quiet and mysterious rancher to give up. She may have come into Lou’s life easily, but she certainly isn’t planning to leave that way. Undeterred by Lou’s prickly demeanor, Clementine is determined to get her reluctant spouse to open up to her.
When the past comes back to haunt the pair, the fight for their independence—and their love—may become more deadly than either of them ever expected.
Available at:
Prize Money by Celeste Castro
A rodeo queen and a stuntwoman find love in the heartland.
Eva is a rodeo queen whose life is upended by a tall, dark, and handsome bullfighter—a woman. Toma Rozene is an equestrian stuntwoman fresh off the set of a blockbuster film when a family emergency calls her home to help run the family business: rescuing fallen rodeo riders. Eva and Toma’s shared passions and competitive spirits make friendship easy, but, as their feelings deepen, they must decide if the divergent futures they seek will stand in the way of love.
Available at:
Western Blue by Suzie Clarke
In 1868, Caroline Bluebonnet Hutching is forced to leave her Texas home and make a new life in Nevada. But the townsmen are against her, and she can’t get the help she needs. Undaunted, she advertises for female workers, only to find that each woman who answers her ad is as desperate as she is. And she’s entirely unprepared for the one who steals her heart.
When raiders attack Isabel Segura’s horse ranch and slaughter her family, she’s left with nothing—no home, no future, no hope. When she sees Blue’s ad, a new dream sparks to life. Determined to begin again, she sets out on a journey she never could have imagined.
Heroism, loyalty, friendship, and love. The odds are against this unlikely group—but never underestimate women who have nothing to lose.
Available at:
Yellowthroat by Penny Hayes
A daring woman bandit terrorizes America’s southwest…
The time is the gold rush days in New Mexico Territory. Embittered Margarita Sanchez has sworn to avenge the racist lynching of her Anglo husband and the loss of the ranch they had built together.
Accompanied by three male companions, she ruthlessly extracts her revenge in a series of stagecoach robberies. Then a gang member is critically wounded during a bank holdup, and Margarita is forced to take Julia Blake hostage, bringing her back to the gang’s camp.
Once more Margarita’s life undergoes drastic changes. Because amid a growing emotional attachment to Julia Blake, she has discovered the unthinkable: a sexual attraction to another woman.
Penny Hayes gives us another fascinating tale filled with authentic and colorful detail of mining towns and gold dust fever and every day western life – and of how women with independent minds lived in the old west.
Available at:
Innocent Hearts by Radclyffe
In 1860’s Montana Territory, Kate Beecher, a young woman from Boston, faces the hardships and hard choices of life on the frontier. Just eighteen and quietly struggling against the social constraints of the era, Kate meets a woman who fires first her imagination, and then her dreams. Jessie Forbes, a fiercely independent rancher, finds in Kate the passion she never knew she had been missing. This is the story of their struggle to love in a land, and time, as cruel as it was beautiful.
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This Means War by Benna Bos
Molly Green thought she’d left chaos—and heartbreak—behind when a reckless affair destroyed her career. Returning to her rural Montana hometown, she poured herself into restoring Theia, a ghost town frozen in time, breathing life back into its crumbling streets one historical tour and book at a time. The last thing she needs? Another ambitious woman—especially one she’s already kissed and can’t stop craving—threatening everything she’s fought to rebuild.
Seph Milan is done playing small. Fresh off a bitter divorce and a career where her genius was stolen, she’s determined to claim her own piece of the world. Theia promises a fresh start—a blank slate she can call hers—until Molly’s firestorm of stubborn desire and simmering resentment stands in her way.
When passion ignites, it burns hotter than ambition. As Molly and Seph clash over Theia’s future, every heated glance, every lingering touch, and every stolen kiss becomes a battle they can’t walk away from.
Available at:
Golden Ruin by Emma Kennedy
This isn’t the Wild West you’ve seen before.
In the aftermath of a chaotic gold rush and the resulting war, a mega-corporation emerges, seizing control of the nation’s gold and the technology produced from it. Those defeated scattered to the coasts, left to fend for themselves. The once vibrant California now contends with radiation, harsh elements, and bandits.
Cassidy moves to one of California’s last two surviving towns for one thing: to save her life. Suffering from a mysterious illness, Bell Valley is her last chance at finding a cure. Despite her best efforts to keep her distance, she’s drawn to the town and its locals. New beginnings are hard — even harder in the wastelands, and it doesn’t help that her enigmatic boss, Willa, wants nothing to do with her.
But as things start to change between the two of them, Cassidy is being tracked by a man with a dangerous bounty on her. Will she be able to save herself before it’s too late?
Available at:
My Darling Clementine by Genta Sebastian
In My Darling Clementine, Clem Dennison, 23, lives as a man among men, passing as a male prospector in California where she is a respected author writing popular articles about the gold rush and the colorful people of the wild west. After a disturbing visit back east, she makes plans to return to the gold fields, joining a late-season wagon train headed for Sacramento.
Kizzy Walker, 18, arrives in Independence, Missouri as a single woman, alone, her only plan to chase the gold fever driving her west. Recognizing Clem as a woman who is passing, Kizzy chases her into the dark night to confront her, inadvertently becoming a target for ruthless men.
Clem rescues the inexperienced, beautiful, impulsive woman, and finds herself in a passionate embrace. Kizzy scandalizes them both by giving her a key to her hotel room, asking her to visit after everyone’s asleep. When Clem takes that chance, she meets a woman unlike any other.
No one else has ever seen through Clem before, much less thrown themselves into her arms. She agrees to take Kizzy with her to California and teach her how to pan for gold, if the fascinating woman will marry her the next day, so they can travel in the wagon train as man and wife.
Available at:
Comrade Cowgirl by Yolanda Wallace
For cattle rancher Laramie Bowman, family always comes first. After her brother is injured in a rodeo accident, she accepts a lucrative position in remote Godoroye, Russia, to help pay his medical bills. When she meets the woman assigned to be her interpreter, however, her heart might end up getting lost in translation.
Anastasia Petrova would prefer to remain on the front lines of the seemingly futile fight for gay rights in her conservative homeland, but dwindling finances force her to leave Moscow to take a full-time job working as a translator for a pair of American trainers on a start-up cattle ranch. If she comes out to her new coworkers, she could lose the job she so desperately needs. But when she meets gorgeous cowgirl Laramie, how can she possibly deny her feelings?
Available at:
Somewhere Between Love and Justice: The Journey of Sarah Sawyer by S.W. Andersen
Sarah Sawyer has spent the last ten years reliving a nightmare. Stripped of her innocence at the tender age of thirteen, she’s grown into a woman with nothing to lose and one thing on her mind.
Justice.
With her horse, her guns and a plan, she takes to the trails of the old west in search of those who wronged her family. A trusted friend shares the quest for justice, but wants so much more. However, another silently holds Sarah’s heart.
Little does Sarah know, the woman, Jo, who graces her dreams has a past of her own and has spent the last year wishing for the return of the mysterious gunslinger who stole her heart.
When Sarah’s path takes a disastrous turn, the pair reunite. Now the gunslinger has to decide if she will open herself up to love or let her thirst for vengeance lead her down a path of no return.
Choosing between love and justice was never part of her plan.
Available at:
Outlaw Hearts by Lori G. Matthews
Outlaw Elle Barstow spends her days robbing stagecoaches and her nights bedding women—all while keeping her heart safely locked away.
But everything changes when Isabella “Izzy” Collins enters her life. Banished by her family, the fiery suffragette from Boston is reluctantly traveling west to marry a man much older than herself.
When Elle rescues Izzy during a stagecoach robbery gone wrong, she plans to ransom Izzy for a hefty reward. But Elle soon finds herself drawn to the captivating woman who challenges her every instinct.
As Izzy insists on learning how to survive in the wild, Elle’s plan begins to unravel, and she faces a new peril—the growing attraction that threatens to melt her hardened heart.
Available at:
Sapphic Book Bingo database
One of our long-time readers and Sapphic Book Bingo participants has created a website to help you track the books you have already read for the reading challenge and your TBR pile.
There’s also a database with books for each category. You can also create a bingo card with the books you’ve read with just a few clicks! Check out the Sapphic Book Bingo database.
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Leave a comment
What sapphic book will you be reading for the “sapphic western novels” category? Let us know in the comments!
4 Responses
I would add Queenslander by Laura Garden to this list!
Just wondering but stories from the native population in that time period would count too right like for instance: Tiopa Ki Lakota by D. Jordan Redhawk.
I love that book – it’s one of my all-time favorites! I also recommend Tumbleweed Fever by L.J. Maas.
Yes! They absolutely count.