Abe Lincoln Book Award 2023: Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Fifteen-year-old Jack and sixteen-year-old Wilhelm, assistants to--and captives of--rival magicians, fall in love against the backdrop of Seattle's 1908 world's fair, the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition.

In 1955, eighteen-year-old Janet Jones keeps the love she shares with her best friend Marie a secret. It's not easy being gay in Washington, DC in the age of McCarthyism, but when she discovers a series of books about women falling in love with other women, it awakens something in Janet. As she juggles a romance she must keep hidden and a newfound ambition to write and publish her own story, she risks exposing herself-and-Marie-to a danger all too real. Sixty-two years later, Abby Zimet can't stop thinking about her senior project and its subject classic 1950s lesbian pulp fiction, Between the pages of her favorite book, the stresses of Abby's own life are lost to the fictional hopes, desires and tragedies of the characters she's reading about. She feels especially connected to one author, a women who wrote under the pseudonym 'Marian Love' and becomes determined to track her down and discover her true identity.

In 1578 Hungary, sixteen-year-old Anna is elevated from scullery maid to chambermaid by the young and glamorous Countess Elizabeth Báthory, falling completely under the Countess's spell until Anna realizes that she is not a friend but a prisoner of the increasingly cruel and murderous Elizabeth.