Welcome to My Skala Online
There ought to be a Greek word for the moment you arrive somewhere new and feel, rather inconveniently, that you have come home.
Skala Eressos can do that to a woman.
Perhaps it is the Aegean light, which makes even an ordinary glass of wine look faintly momentous. Perhaps it is the sea, or Sappho’s Head keeping watch at the end of the beach. Perhaps it is the simple relief of being in a place where women loving women is neither an announcement nor a problem to be solved.
Whatever the reason, Skala has a way of loosening the knots we arrive with.
Welcome, then, to my Skala Online.
A Place to Arrive
This website is the online home of Jules Hart and the Sappho’s Shore Collection: lesbian romance novels set in Skala Eressos, on the Greek island of Lesvos.
It is also intended to be more than a shelf with a BUY button attached.
Think of it as a quiet table at the edge of a busy beach bar. There may be music somewhere behind us, somebody will almost certainly be arguing about where to eat, and the sunset will arrive whether we are ready for it or not. We can sit here and talk about books, women, writing, Sappho, Skala, desire, reinvention and the peculiar courage required to begin again.
You do not have to buy anything to belong here. Though naturally I shall not wrestle a book from your hands should one happen to find its way there.
Stories for Women Who Have Lived
I write lesbian romance for mature readers who want more than romantic pap.
My heroines are not blank pages waiting for love to give them a life. They arrive with careers, ex-lovers, private failures, complicated families, griefs they have learned to carry and habits they would defend in court. They are often old enough to know better and still young enough—or brave enough—to do it anyway.
The romance matters. Very much. But so do the women having it.
The Sappho’s Shore books are character-driven lesbian fiction about second chances, chosen family and the selves we become when the old version no longer fits. Queerness is a given, not the central crisis. The obstacles are the ones adults know rather too well: pride, duty, loss, fear, timing and the terrible vulnerability of being properly seen.
There is humour, because desire is rarely dignified. There is sensuality, because bodies are part of our stories. There is grief, because happiness means more when it has been earned. Above all, there is warmth.
The Island Behind the Stories
Each Sappho’s Shore novel stands alone, but the books share a living world. Characters cross one another’s paths. Familiar faces reappear at the Chelonian beach bar, in the village, at the animal sanctuary or beside a fire on the sand. A woman glimpsed in one story may step forward in another carrying an entire hidden life.
At the centre of it all is Skala Eressos: real, imperfect, sunlit, windswept and internationally cherished by lesbian and queer women.
The village is not simply scenery. In my lesbian fiction set in Greece, the island acts as permission. Women come carrying heartbreak, burnout, regret or a dare from fate. Skala does not magically repair them. It gives them room to hear what they already know—and a community that may notice when they try to run away from it.
Sappho, naturally, is never far off. Her words, her myths and the gaps in what history chose to preserve run through the contemporary novels and into The Mortal Muse, my Sappho-inspired fiction set in the ancient world. The past is rarely as tidy as people selling certainty would like it to be. Neither is love.
Here on Skala Online, I shall share the stories behind the stories: the real island and its atmosphere, the women who inspire me, queer history, the pleasures and difficulties of writing, and occasional dispatches from a fictional village whose residents are becoming increasingly convinced they run the place.
I hope you will find intelligent conversation, dry humour, emotional honesty and enough Aegean sunlight to improve a grey afternoon.
Most of all, I hope this becomes somewhere you want to return to.
The sea is not going anywhere. Pull up a chair.
