Allen & Unwin, Australia 2026
Cover design Deborah Parry Graphics
Cover photographs: Deagreez/Shutterstock; fotokostic/iStock; Tara Malhotra/iStock; Gillian Van Stocksy; Paul Shuang/Shutterstock
Maya Linnell has mastered the art of sugar frosting the dark real-world issues she tackles in her fiction with rural romances we can all get behind.
Allen & Unwin, Australia 2025
Cover design Lisa White
Cover photographs Cookie Studio/Shutterstock; thka/Shutterstock; Ben Ashmole/Shutterstock
Maya Linnell habitually dresses up her interest in contemporary social issues in gentle rural romance, in the everyday lives of regional Australians whether they be on the land or engaged in other business pursuits.
Published in the Outback Nurse Anniversary Collection by Mills & Boon, an imprint of Harlequin Enterprises P/L, a subsidiary of HarperCollins Publishers, Australia, 2024
Cover design Melissa Coates
Cover illustration Ross Murphy
Mills and Boon celebrate their 50th anniversary in 2024 and the publishers have marked this by releasing four compendiums, each paying homage to a beloved series line – Modern, Medical, Suspense and Western.
Allen & Unwin,Australia, 2024
Cover design Nada Backovic
Cover photographs: Goodboy Picture Company/iStock; Maya Linnell; Southern Lightscapes-Australia
Post partum psychosis, OCD, PTSD and severe anxiety may not sound like the stuff of rural romance, but these subjects are indeed the substantial matters that carry the icing in Maya Linnell’s latest novel Wallaby Lane.
Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2024
Cover design Nada Bakovic
Cover photos Getty Images; Kim Miller; iStock, Unsplash
Inside back cover photo Taylor Portelli
True to the Trojan Horse approach adopted by so many contemporary Australian rural romance writers, Léonie Kelsall has incorporated a number of significant social and human issues into this novel.
Hachette, Australia, 2022
Cover design by Christabella Design
Cover photos courtesy Trevillion and Alamy
With a cover reminiscent of the 1969 film version of Age of Consent, it comes as no surprise that The Wrong Sister is a steamy rural romance. However, alongside the straining trousers and moist folds, the book raises several serious social and philosophical issues.
Independently published, Australia, 2022
Cover design SGB Book Cover Designs
Images from Istock
It is cause for great celebration, I think, that the Canberra region is not only become home to a growing number of fine writers but also that the region itself has finally been accepted as a suitable place in which to set stories. The lamentable cultural cringe our writers have had to contend with for decades has, at last, abated.
Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2022
Cover design by Mika Tabata
Cover photo Getty Images
Rural romance is a very popular genre in Australia and Nicole Hurley-Moore certainly knows how to grab her readers – this is the seventh of her books and it’s bound to be as successful as its predecessors. Many people are grasping for some cheerfulness in dark times and this author is a fan of happy, or at least positive, endings.
Internal illustrations by Julie Stapleton
Self-published, Australia, first edition 2016, second edition 2019, third edition 2020
Deanna Copeland is a Canberra-based visual artist and writer. Reluctant Pioneer, the first of her two novels, is inspired by stories told to her by her mother, who came to Australia from England with her husband in 1948.
It is however a work of fiction, an Australian rural romance set in the recent past during the 1940s and 1950s.
Allen & Unwin, Australia, 2021
Take Me Home is a story of the search for self and family. Our heroine Elle honours the wishes of her beloved grandmother by taking her ashes to her Scottish homeland, which she left at the age of 15 with a mystery in her wake.
Elle’s life to date has been one of feeling like a square peg in her family. Her siblings have all followed academic paths to successful careers; her mother is a bit of a helicopter, wanting Elle to also follow that expected path. Only her dad and her grandma (his mother) seem to understand that she is of a different ilk.
