Last Night at the Telegraph Club

Author: Malinda Lo

ISBN: 9780525555278 (Paperback), 9780525555254 (Hardcover)

Tags: Lesbian, Young Adult, POC and Queer, Historical Fiction, Romance

"The queer romance we’ve been waiting for.”—Ms. Magazine

Seventeen-year-old Lily Hu can't remember exactly when the feeling took root—that desire to look, to move closer, to touch. Whenever it started growing, it definitely bloomed the moment she and Kathleen Miller walked under the flashing neon sign of a lesbian bar called the Telegraph Club. Suddenly everything seemed possible. 

But America in 1954 is not a safe place for two girls to fall in love, especially not in Chinatown. Red-Scare paranoia threatens everyone, including Chinese Americans like Lily. With deportation looming over her father—despite his hard-won citizenship—Lily and Kath risk everything to let their love see the light of day.

Winner of the National Book Award
Winner of the Stonewall Book Award
Winner of the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature
A Michael L. Printz Honor Book
A We Need Diverse Books Walter Dean Myers Honor Book
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist

"Lo beckons readers, sentence by restrained sentence, into this incandescent novel of queer possibility."—National Book Award Winner Citation

"A vivid historical document of midcentury queer life."—Wall Street Journal

"Lo's writing, restrained yet luscious, shimmers with the thrills of youthful desire. A lovely, memorable novel about listening to the whispers of a wayward heart and claiming a place in the world."—Sarah Waters, international bestselling and award winning author of Tipping the Velvet and The Night Watch

"Exquisite and heart-shattering, Last Night at the Telegraph Club made me ache with wishing. This book is for anyone who has ever loved—in any sense of the word."—Emily X.R. Pan, New York Times bestselling author of The Astonishing Color of After

"Lily is my favorite kind of heroine: observant, loving, and startlingly brave. Malinda Lo is my favorite kind of writer, one who can bring a scene to life with exquisite detail and nuance. Last Night at the Telegraph Club is a triumph. It is the queer novel I wish I had read as a teenager, and feel lucky to have read now."—Marie Rutkoski, New York Times bestselling author of The Winner's Trilogy   

"Oh, what a wonderful novel this is! For all who ever dared to want more, much more, from life—a beautifully sensitive love story, with telling historic detail."—Susan Elia MacNeal, New York Times bestselling author of the Edgar-nominated Maggie Hope series

"Malinda Lo's Last Night at the Telegraph Club is an instant classic, the finest LGBTQIA+ romance I've read in ages. Lo has lovingly re-created 1950s San Francisco and made me feel as though I'd lived there, and her depiction of first love felt so real that I experienced it in long-since-forgotten corners of my own heart."—Bill Konigsberg, award-winning author of The Music of What Happens and The Bridge