Heppe-Smith Publishing

Category: Book Recommendations

  • The Complete Sapphic Cozy Fantasy Reading List

    The Complete Sapphic Cozy Fantasy Reading List

    If you’ve ever typed “sapphic cozy fantasy” into a search bar hoping for a nice long list to work through, you already know the frustration. The books exist — more every year — but finding them means piecing together BookTok recommendations, Reddit threads, and Goodreads lists that mix cozy with grimdark with “has one queer side character.” Not quite what you’re after.

    This list is what I wish I’d had when I started looking. Every book here has a sapphic romance that’s central to the story (not a subplot you could blink and miss), and every one delivers on the cozy promise: low stakes, warm endings, and the kind of reading experience that makes you feel better, not worse.

    I’ll keep updating this as new titles come out. If I’ve missed something, let me know in the comments.

    The Essentials

    These are the books that come up every time someone asks for sapphic cozy fantasy. If you haven’t read them yet, start here.

    Legends & Lattes by Travis Baldree

    The book that kicked off the cozy fantasy boom. Viv, a battle-worn orc barbarian, retires from adventuring to open a coffee shop in a city where nobody knows what coffee is. Her slow-burn romance with Tandri, a succubus with remarkable people skills, is one of the genre’s warmest love stories. The sapphic element isn’t the focus of the plot — it’s simply part of who these characters are — which makes it feel all the more real. If you haven’t read this, it’s the starting point for a reason.

    Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne (Tomes & Tea series)

    Where Legends & Lattes features a sapphic romance alongside the shop-building plot, the Tomes & Tea series puts the relationship front and centre. Reyna (royal guard) and Kianthe (realm’s most powerful mage) quit their jobs to open a bookshop and tea house in a tiny town. They’re already together when the series starts, which is refreshing — the tension comes from building a life, not from will-they-won’t-they. Four books and counting, with Tea You at the Altar covering their wedding. This is probably the single best sapphic cozy fantasy series running right now.

    The Honey Witch by Sidney J. Shields

    Marigold, a young woman trained in honey magic on a tiny Irish island, has always been warned against falling in love — the family curse means love will only bring heartbreak. Then a woman called Lottie arrives on the island and upends everything. The prose is gorgeous, the setting is cottagecore perfection, and the central romance aches in the best way. One content note: the book does contain an on-page death, so it runs slightly darker than the other titles here, though it resolves warmly.

    Shop & Settle Stories

    For readers who love watching characters build something — a shop, a home, a life — with the person they’re falling for.

    A Nest of Magic by Kate Moseman

    Explicitly marketed as sapphic cozy fantasy, and it delivers. A witch running a magical boarding house navigates small-town politics, mysterious guests, and a slow-building romance. Moseman also maintains one of the best lists of sapphic cozy fantasy titles online, so she clearly knows the genre inside out. Warm, gentle, and exactly what it promises to be.

    Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C.B. Lee

    A short, sweet novella that does exactly what the title suggests — two women falling for each other across the counter of a magical coffee shop. It’s slight compared to the longer series on this list, but it’s perfect when you want something you can finish in an afternoon and still feel warm about the next day.

    Tavern Tale by Kristina W. Kelly

    A retired adventurer takes over a run-down tavern and finds herself entangled with the locals, the local magic, and a woman she wasn’t expecting. The “retired adventurer builds something peaceful” setup echoes Legends & Lattes, but Kelly gives it a distinctly sapphic centre and a community that feels lived-in and real.

    Creatures & Keepers

    Magical creatures make everything cosier. These books pair sapphic romance with animal care, dragon keeping, and the quiet joy of tending to something small and wonderful.

    The Phoenix Keeper by S.A. MacLean

    Aila is a keeper at a magical zoo, and she’s been tasked with caring for the last known phoenix — who appears to be dying. Enter Luciana, a mysterious scholar with secrets of her own. The zoo setting is gorgeously realised, the phoenix plotline gives the story just enough stakes without tipping into darkness, and the romance unfolds with the kind of slow patience that cozy fantasy readers crave.

    The Tea Dragon Society by Kay O’Neill

    A graphic novel — and a beautiful one. Tea dragons are tiny dragons that grow tea leaves, and the story follows a girl who learns the ancient art of caring for them. The sapphic elements are gentle and woven naturally into the narrative, and the art is so warm you’ll want to live inside it. There are several volumes now, each as lovely as the last. Perfect for when you want something cozy but don’t have the energy for a full novel.

    Witchy & Wonderful

    Witches and sapphic romance go together like a cauldron and a flame. These titles lean into the magical side of cozy.

    A Ruthless Lady’s Guide to Wizardry by C.M. Waggoner

    Dellaria Wells is a fire witch, a drunk, and a disaster. When she takes a bodyguard job to earn some quick coin, she meets Mrs. Totham — composed, elegant, and completely out of her league. Waggoner’s writing has more bite than most cozy fantasy (Delly is genuinely rough around the edges), but the found family, the romance, and the warm resolution earn it a place on this list. Think cozy with an edge.

    I Ran Away to Evil by Mystic Neptune

    A warrior princess who’d rather bake cookies than fight evil shows up to defeat the Dark Lord, who turns out to be a lonely, practical woman who invites her in for tea. The premise is pure joy, and the execution matches it. Funny, sweet, and genuinely romantic. If you want sapphic cozy fantasy that doesn’t take itself too seriously, this is the one.

    Pumpkin Spice & Poltergeist by Ali K. Mulford & K. Elle Morrison (Maple Hollow series)

    Sapphic paranormal romance meets cozy small-town vibes. The Maple Hollow books blend witchy settings, gentle supernatural elements, and WLW romance in a way that feels like autumn in book form. Light, warm, and perfect seasonal reading.

    Something Different

    These don’t fit neatly into the categories above, but they absolutely belong on a sapphic cozy fantasy list.

    How to Get a Girlfriend (When You’re a Terrifying Monster) by Marie Cardno

    A dimension-exploring witch and an eldritch shape-shifting monster fall for each other while trying not to get consumed by the Endless. It’s stranger and funnier than anything else on this list, but the tenderness at its centre is unmistakably cozy. If your taste in sapphic romance runs to “weird, warm, and completely original,” you’ll love this.

    The Last Route by James Heppe-Smith (20-book series)

    This is my own series, so take the recommendation with whatever grain of salt you like — but I wrote it specifically because I wanted more sapphic cozy fantasy that didn’t revolve around a shop.

    The Last Route follows Wren Ashwick, a failed mage assigned to the most remote postal route in the realm of Aeldra. Over twenty books, she discovers her “broken” magic is something extraordinary, falls in love with a green witch named Rowan, befriends a hedgehog called Thistle who communicates in stomps, and builds a life among the overlooked communities along her circuit.

    The romance is slow-burn and central. The grumpy/sunshine dynamic builds through the first five books into a relationship that deepens beautifully across the rest of the series. The stakes stay personal, every book ends warm, and the sapphic love story is the emotional spine of the whole thing.

    Six books are out now. The Second Summer (Book 7) releases 23 April 2026.

    Start with Dead Letters (Book 1), or explore the full series on the Last Route series page.

    What’s Coming Next

    The sapphic cozy fantasy shelf is growing fast. A few 2025/2026 releases worth watching:

    Tea You at the Altar by Rebecca Thorne — the latest Tomes & Tea book, covering Kianthe and Reyna’s wedding. The Keeper of Magical Things by Julie Leong — a follow-up to The Teller of Small Fortunes, sending two mismatched mages to the dullest village in the realm. Agnes Aubert’s Magical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett — from the Emily Wilde author, featuring a widowed cat rescuer caught in a magical turf war. And of course, The Second Summer (The Last Route, Book 7) from yours truly, releasing 23 April 2026.

    I’ll update this list as new titles publish. If you know of a sapphic cozy fantasy I’ve missed, drop it in the comments — I’m always looking for more.

    Keep reading: What Is Cozy Fantasy? A Genre Guide for 2026, If You Loved Legends & Lattes, Try These Cozy Fantasy Series.

    Want a free bonus story? Join the reader community and get Quills & Quiet — a Last Route short story — at heppesmithpublishing.com/thistle.

    James Heppe-Smith is the author of The Last Route, a 20-book sapphic cozy fantasy series published by Heppe-Smith Publishing. He writes from Northern Cyprus, where the cats are plentiful and the coffee is strong.

    As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Book links in this post are affiliate links — they cost you nothing extra, but help support this site and the writing of more cozy fantasy.

  • If You Loved Legends & Lattes, Try These Cozy Fantasy Series

    If You Loved Legends & Lattes, Try These Cozy Fantasy Series

    You know that feeling when you finish a book and just sit there for a minute, not ready to leave the world yet? That was me after Legends & Lattes. Travis Baldree did something that shouldn’t have worked on paper – an orc barbarian opens a coffee shop, zero world-ending stakes, and somehow it became one of the most beloved fantasy novels of the decade.

    And then you’re left wanting more. Not a sequel (though Bookshops & Bonedust delivered). You want that feeling again. The warm mug in your hands, the found family assembling around the counter, the quiet satisfaction of watching someone build a life instead of burning one down.

    I’ve spent a frankly unreasonable amount of time chasing that feeling through the cozy fantasy genre. Some of these books gave me exactly what I was looking for. Others surprised me with something I didn’t know I needed. All of them belong on your shelf if Viv’s coffee shop felt like home.

    The Books That Scratch the Same Itch

    Can’t Spell Treason Without Tea by Rebecca Thorne

    If Legends & Lattes is the book that launched cozy fantasy, this one perfected the sapphic corner of it. Reyna and Kianthe quit their high-stress jobs (royal guard and realm-saving mage, respectively) and open a bookshop-tea shop in a tiny town. The appeal is identical to L&L – watching two people choose peace over duty – but Thorne leans harder into the romance, and it works beautifully. The Tomes & Tea series now runs to multiple books, and readers devour each one. If you want the cozy shop vibe with a central sapphic love story, start here.

    The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune

    Linus Baker is a caseworker for magical children, and he has never once broken a rule. Then he’s sent to investigate an orphanage on a remote island, run by the charming and mysterious Arthur Parnassus. The emotional DNA here is pure Legends & Lattes – found family, institutional rigidity versus genuine warmth, a quiet person discovering they’re allowed to want a different life. Klune writes with a gentleness that never tips into saccharine. You’ll ugly-cry at least once. Fair warning.

    The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna

    Mika Moon pretends to be a witch on the internet (she actually is one), gets hired to tutor three young witches at a crumbling manor house, and finds exactly the family she’s spent her whole life pretending she doesn’t need. The cottagecore vibes are immaculate. There’s a handsome librarian. The children are wonderful. It doesn’t reinvent any wheels, but it spins the existing ones with such warmth that you won’t care.

    A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers

    Technically solarpunk sci-fi, not fantasy. I don’t care, and neither will you. A tea monk named Dex travels between communities serving drinks and listening to people’s problems. Then a robot wanders out of the wilderness with a question about what humans actually need. It won the Hugo for a reason. Chambers writes the kind of gentle philosophical fiction that makes you set the book down and stare at the ceiling, wondering if maybe everything will be okay. Two novellas, both short, both essential.

    The Spellshop by Sarah Beth Durst

    A librarian smuggles banned spell books to a remote island and opens an illegal jam shop that secretly runs on magic. The premise alone is doing about four things I love. Durst nails the cozy fantasy formula – beautiful island setting, gentle community, botanical magic, and a romance that builds through shared work and mutual respect. Her follow-up, The Enchanted Greenhouse, doubles down on the botanical angle and is arguably even cosier.

    Emily Wilde’s Encyclopaedia of Faeries by Heather Fawcett

    An antisocial academic travels to a snow-bound Scandinavian village to study the local fae. Her charming rival follows. What unfolds is part cozy mystery, part slow-burn romance, part genuinely fascinating faerie folklore. This one has a slightly different energy to the shop-and-settle stories – there’s more adventure, more intellectual puzzle-solving – but the found family builds just as naturally, and the complete trilogy delivers on every promise it makes.

    Ones to Watch in 2026

    Cozy fantasy isn’t slowing down. A few titles on my radar this year:

    Agnes Aubert’s Magical Cat Shelter by Heather Fawcett drops the Emily Wilde academic setting for a plump, pink-cheeked widow running a cat rescue that gets caught up in a magical turf war. Everything I’ve seen suggests this is going to be pure comfort reading. The Keeper of Magical Things (following The Teller of Small Fortunes) by Julie Leong sends two mismatched mages to catalogue magical objects in the dullest village they can find – and naturally, nothing stays dull for long. Both are strong bets if you’re hungry for more.

    The Gap Nobody’s Filled (Until Now)

    Here’s something I noticed after reading dozens of these books: the settings cluster. Coffee shops, tea shops, bookshops, bakeries, magical inns. All wonderful. All increasingly familiar. The most creative entries in the genre tend to be the ones that plant their flag somewhere unexpected.

    That observation is partly why I wrote The Last Route.

    When I started plotting a cozy fantasy series, I kept asking: what setting gives you the warmth and community of a shop-based story, but also lets you meet new people, visit new places, and follow a character across an entire world? The answer that kept coming back was a postal route.

    The Last Route follows Wren Ashwick, a failed mage assigned to the most remote delivery circuit in the realm of Aeldra. She’s bitter, she’s qualified for better things (or so she thinks), and she has no idea that her “broken” magic is actually something far more extraordinary. Over the course of the series, she discovers that objects carry emotional history she can feel, befriends a hedgehog with an attitude problem, falls slowly and irreversibly in love with a green witch named Rowan, and learns that the overlooked places along her route hold magic that powerful institutions have forgotten.

    If you loved Legends & Lattes for the found family, the competence, the “someone builds something meaningful” arc – that’s the spine of this series. But instead of one shop, you get an entire route full of communities. Lighthouse keepers and shepherds and retired couriers and a village deep in an ancient forest that feels slightly out of time. The romance is sapphic, the stakes stay personal, and every book ends warm.

    Six books are out now, with The Second Summer (Book 7) releasing 23 April 2026. The series runs to twenty books in total – enough to properly live in Aeldra if you want to.

    You can find the full series on the Last Route series page, or grab The Last Route: Dead Letters (Book 1) to start the journey.

    What Makes Cozy Fantasy Work

    I think the reason Legends & Lattes resonated so deeply – and why the genre keeps growing – comes down to a single thing: permission.

    Permission to want a story where nobody dies horribly. Permission to care about whether the pastries turn out right. Permission to read something that makes you feel better instead of worse. The world has enough grim. These books say: it’s okay to want warmth. It’s not shallow. It’s not boring. It’s the bravest thing a story can do – promise you safety and actually keep that promise.

    Every book on this list keeps that promise. I hope you find something here that gives you exactly the reading experience you need.

    Keep reading: What Is Cozy Fantasy? A Genre Guide for 2026, The Complete Sapphic Cozy Fantasy Reading List.

    Want a free bonus story? Join the reader community and get Quills & Quiet — a Last Route short story — at heppesmithpublishing.com/thistle.

    James Heppe-Smith is the author of The Last Route, a 20-book sapphic cozy fantasy series published by Heppe-Smith Publishing. He writes from Northern Cyprus, where the Mediterranean light is pretty cozy in its own right.

    As an Amazon Associate, I earn from qualifying purchases. Book links in this post are affiliate links — they cost you nothing extra, but help support this site and the writing of more cozy fantasy.