As book genres go it’s like a holiday romance with no strings attached – and it’s been hugely popular during the pandemic
In the days when I took small children on resort holidays, I’d make a point of reading at least one of the novels on the bookshelves. Some of them were terrible: frowsty clogs-and-shawls sagas, saucy doctors and nurses fantasies and oh so many dogeared Dan Browns. But that’s how I got to know about Danielle Steel, Marian Keyes and Julia Quinn, to name just three. And guess what? They’re still there, hugging the top of the sales charts, and helping to drive a 20% increase in fiction sales over the pandemic year.
By far the biggest rise was in “romantic fiction and sagas”, sales of which leapt by 49% to nearly 6m. Even though that’s only a third of the number of “crime, thriller and adventure” novels devoured over the year, it adds up to a lot of fluttering hearts. And, given that in literary rather than sales terms, “romance and sagas” is another way of saying women’s fiction, while crime, thrillers and adventure are three genres with universal appeal, rather than just finding their readers from one half of the population, those figures seem all the more astonishing. So what is going on?
Claire Armitstead is associate editor, culture, for the Guardian
