Romance writers are the best read and worst regarded of all Australian authors. They write and sell more books than anyone else, but receive little or no critical attention. If attention is paid, it is usually a condescending snigger, and yet they have a global readership that other authors can only dream of. This is the contradiction that drives Juliet Flesch’s scholarly history of Australian popular romantic fiction. Her main grievance is that these books are dismissed as trash, or condemned as dangerous, by those who don’t read them. She argues that no other type of fiction would be judged by those whose familiarity with the genre is so scant.