Was that a conscious decision or was it where your imagination was taking you?

Yeah, it was a bit of an accident, to be honest.

So for those of you who aren't familiar with my body of work, my first four novels are all young adults.

So there is a trilogy, the Valentine trilogy, which are young adults with paranormal romance-y in that kind of fantasy spectrum.

There is one contemporary, Libby Lawrence's Good at Pretending, which is actually the first book I ever wrote.

I wrote the first draft when I was 20.

I rewrote it from the ground up four times.

slippery, slippery slope

Let's hear, 'cause Ch- Chess is a family lawyer.

Yeah, so Chess is a, a very scary lawyer.

So this is a little excerpt from the book that takes place during a mediation meeting between Fiona and Matt and their various legal teams.

"I wished I could have enjoyed the way the color drained from Matt's face in the mediation meeting as Chess outlined everything he'd tried to conceal, ticking various offshore accounts and shell companies off on her fingers in response to his lawyer's argument that he didn't have the assets to pay me more than the bare minimum in child support.

I wished I could have enjoyed the muscle that started to twitch in his jaw as he realized that despite all his money, my legal team was better than his.

The way his nose started to turn red as he figured out he wasn't gonna get away with leaving as cleanly as he thought.

But I still had the memory of all those years in my veins.

[laughs] Well, Fiona thinks that she's keeping this relationship a secret, but some people pick it up.

age gap represented in the texts.

When I wrote An Academic Affair, which is the first book in the Love Notes series, I was very conscious of the fact that I was setting up other books in this series as I went.

Fiona and Satoshi were always going to be the second book, and I always wanted to explore this age gap.

So previously I've written a lot of pairings where the protagonists are about the same age.

I think the biggest age gap I've had in the past is five years.

And even then it was an older man, younger woman, and it wasn't really particularly part of the narrative.

He was 31 and she was, it was only four years.

The public perception of their

What's changed? You don't see them in the same way anymore.

So, there are a few things that have changed there.

So when we think about the, uh, the bodice ripper, scare quotes around that phrase, we're talking about quite a specific period in the history of romance fiction.

Uh, we're talking about sort of what we would call the erotic historical novel of the 1970s through to about the 1990s.

These are the ones that we think of with Fabio on the cover.

But like any market, uh, the market shifted.

So those sort of big, bombastic, erotic historicals sort of turned the volume down a little bit, and from there we got sort of gentler historicals.

Uh, right, Jodi, what kind of themes are re- readers reaching for in 2026?

Romance is the slowest selling category." Jodi, that is at odds with what I hear about what's happening in the publishing industry.

Uh, well, 'cause this is a secondhand bookstore, I mean, this is honestly quite surprising to me as well, but because this is a secondhand bookstore, I wonder if there is something a little bit different going on there.

So what we are seeing in romance at the moment is a real romanticization of the object of the book.

We're seeing a lot of beautiful special editions coming out, uh, hardbacks, sprayed edges, foil covers, that kind of thing.

And so the places that people are looking for their romance novels are perhaps a little bit different than they have been in the past.

Uh, previously, romance has been relegated to dark corners of bookstores, and op shops have been, um, very, very busy.

I've done some work talking to people who were reading in the '80s, and a lot of them sourced their books from op shops.

Uh, right, Jodi, what kind of themes are re- readers reaching for in 2026?