A mid-90s Naiad Press lesbian novel centred on Sandra, an academic whose carefully managed life begins to destabilise when she becomes involved with a younger woman she is supervising.

Shapiro uses the teacher-student relationship minus the salacious machinery and forces out the issues with professional hierarchy, desire, ageing, self-control and the ways respectable institutions demand that queer lives remain legible only on certain terms. The novel’s world is university offices, research projects, late-night wine and makes the idea of one’s private life becoming administratively consequential, very very clear.

Published by Naiad Press, one of the central houses of twentieth-century lesbian fiction, The Color of Winter belongs to that very specific 1990s queer paperback ecology in which romance, literary fiction and social realism bled into one another. Contemporary catalogues describe it simply as two women trying to live on their own terms, which is basically right, but slightly undersells the book’s interest in power and the difference between freedom in theory and freedom when someone else signs your paperwork.

Naiad Press, Tallahassee, Florida, 1995. First edition. Paperback. Light shelf wear to covers, with minor rubbing and edge wear; slight handling wear at corners. Internally clean and unmarked; binding firm. Very good condition.