AustLit
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24 Feb 2015(Display Format : Landscape)
Australian Romance Novels: A Crowd-Sourced List
Last week, we asked Twitter for a list of their favourite Australian romance novels–and we should have expected the deluge of suggestions that followed.
The suggestions came in two main forms: authors whose entire canon (or at least more than one work) were dearly beloved and individual works with whom readers were besotted.
So this, our crowd-sourced list of your favourite Australian romance writers, is divided into two alphabetical lists: first, the authors whose works you love en masse, and, second, the individual novels that you adore.
(Warning: mixed metaphor ahead.)
These authors and novels are only a taste of Australia's rich vein of romance novels. To explore further, try this list of 4500 novels. Or, for a broader scope, try this list of every single work in AustLit (including novels, but also other forms) labelled 'romance'.
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Looking at Anna Campbell's assured position in Australian romance, it's easy to forget that her first novels were published as recently as 2007.
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Anne Gracie's historical romances have netted her nomination after nomination as Australia's favourite romance writer.
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Multi-award-winning Barbara Hannay has penned some of the most beloved and widely read outback romances ever published in Australia.
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Loretta Hill's Pilbara books–from The Girl in Steel-capped Boots to The Girl in the Hard Hat–appealed to readers who like their romance red and dusty.
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For their small-town romances, readers were looking to Jennie Jones to provide–three-hundred-pound pigs and all.
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An extraordinarily prolific writer, Marion Lennox has works well into triple figures recorded on AustLit.
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For their richly researched historical romances of the fifteenth century, readers were going straight to Isolde Martyn.
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Sarah Mayberry also has some script-writing under her belt, but she's listed here for her popular romances–most recently, cowboy romances in the wilds of Montana.
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Readers wouldn't choose between McIntosh's works, but particular passion was reserved for Nightingale and The Lavender Keeper.
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Ellie Marney was another novelist whose works readers wouldn't choose between: if it included Rachel Watts and James Mycroft, it was in.
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Kylie Scott made her appearance with romances of the zombie apocalypse such as Room with a View and Flesh, but it was the Stage Dive series that proved a break-out success.
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Curiously, we'd just been talking about Kandy Shepherd on Twitter the week before, as the go-to author for dog-adjacent romances, and here she is on the list.
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Safe Harbour was a particularly popular choice, but it wasn't the only Helene Young novel that people wanted to tell us about.
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A country versus city romance, with a woman determined to save her family farm.
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1604009123607359747.jpg3370348474847650624.jpgBillabong Bend Jennifer Scoullar , 2014 single work novel
The heroine of this novel is a floodplains grazier, with a tie to the land perhaps stronger than her tie to the hero.
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Another of the rural romances that make such wonderful use of the enormous landscape that is Australia, this one is a rich-boy / poor-girl small-town saga.
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What could be better than a wine-flavoured contemporary romance? This one is set in the McLaren Vale.
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Finalist for a Daphne Du Maurier Award for Excellence in Mystery/Suspense (Single Title Romantic Mystery/Suspense), longlisted for a Davitt Award, and winner of an Australian Romance Reader Award–what more reason do you need to pick up this novel of national parks, organised crime, and murder?
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goodoil_FSOO.jpg2289260222469399575.jpg4512435854856655113.jpgGood Oil Laura Buzo , 2010 single work novel
The debut novel for Lauren Buzo, Good Oil is the story of a romance between a teenager and the twenty-one-year-old co-worker for whom she falls hard.
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Three families and three properties are driven apart and drawn together by tragedy and the struggles of life on the land.
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One terrible secret ties two people together forever. Losing Kate was Kylie Kaden's debut novel, and she followed it with another story of devastated relationships and terrible secrets in Missing You.
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7864319248198656488.jpg8461626475700068487.jpgQueen of the Road Tricia Stringer , 2012 single work novel
Truck-drivers and romance novels: it's perhaps not the connection that first springs to mind, but it runs at least as far back as Paperback Hero. In this novel, romance is only one of the heroine's many obstacles.
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4965268765438000746.jpg7842859640725792812.jpgRed Sand Sunrise Fiona McArthur , 2014 single work novel
There's something particularly delightful about a medical romance, something that speaks to romance's nature as its own unique, robust genre. This one involves a midwife and the remote, red stretches of western Queensland.
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Jo's self-imposed rules about staying well away (all the way away) from men for six weeks would have been difficult enough before her new, gorgeous roommate moved in.
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8699275350622606042.jpg604769498409208158.jpg765575078653505188.jpgThe Sunnyvale Girls Fiona Palmer , 2014 single work novel
From 1946 to 2014, from a remote Australian property to Italy, The Sunnyvale Girls untangles the family secrets of three generations of women.
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Juanita Kees is rapidly building a list of romance novels about tough, resilient women and the men who love them–this is her third novel, and already looks to bring her accolades.
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Who to love more in Untamed: the heroine with a penchant for challenging people to duels or the cross-dressing hero who loves her? Combined, it makes for one of the most unusual of Regency romps.
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WildGirl_Forsyth_FXIg.jpg1544496915371234325.jpg3128470683945520208.jpg580592087980437347.jpgThe Wild Girl Kate Forsyth , 2013 single work novel
A book about fairytales with romance at its core, The Wild Girl has attracted rapturous accolades and is already making its way onto university teaching lists.
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