{"id":21238,"date":"2025-09-14T04:19:11","date_gmt":"2025-09-14T04:19:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/21238\/"},"modified":"2025-09-14T04:19:11","modified_gmt":"2025-09-14T04:19:11","slug":"how-new-adult-fiction-got-a-generation-reading-again","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/21238\/","title":{"rendered":"How \u2018new adult\u2019 fiction got a generation reading again"},"content":{"rendered":"

How is the messy girl trend working for you? Have you been \u201csmoking like a chimney\u201d and \u201cpulling a Britney every other week\u201d, as the lyrics to Lola Young<\/a>\u2019s inescapable anthem Messy have it? Perhaps you\u2019ve been channelling Lena Dunham\u2019s sitcom Too Much<\/a>, about an American hot mess who moves to London, where she overshares, overcares, accidentally takes way too much ketamine and does cocaine with her boss? <\/p>\n

Either way, the female-centred media seem to be in agreement. Perfectionism and people-pleasing are out. This year, it\u2019s all about being flawed and raw and a little bit proud of one\u2019s arrested development. \u201cI want to be me,\u201d sings Young, in defiance of the boyfriend who shames her for failing to fold her clothes. \u201cIs that not allowed?\u201d<\/p>\n

Not only allowed but encouraged. Publishers have caught on to the commercial potential of messiness, which was selected by users of BookTok, TikTok\u2019s books community, as one of the defining characteristics of an emerging category of fiction that\u2019s increasingly dominating the bestseller charts: new adult. <\/p>\n

While young adult (YA) fiction is generally aimed at readers aged 12 to 18, new adult (NA) finds its audience in 18 to 30-year-olds, sometimes older. Thanks to TikTok\u2019s voracious readers, it\u2019s now a popular hashtag and one of the fastest-growing areas of the fiction market. It\u2019s no coincidence that 25 to 34-year-olds are the only cohort in the forthcoming State of the Nation study, put together by the charity The Reading Agency, who report an increase in reading for pleasure over the past year. The number of people who read regularly jumped from 42 per cent to 55 per cent, while all other age demographics read less.<\/p>\n

NA novels cater to readers, mostly young women, who are stuck in a messy transitional stage and still haven\u2019t figured things out. They are people who hoovered up the Harry Potter, Twilight and The Hunger Games series and now want stories that read like YA but with spicier romance plots and characters struggling in their first jobs. Think of the megaselling romantasy<\/a> novels by the likes of Sarah J Maas and Rebecca Yarros, which serve up lots of sex in Hogwartsesque settings. Or Taylor Jenkins Reid\u2019s emotionally charged Atmosphere, a love story between two female Nasa astronauts trying to find their feet. The genre\u2019s highbrow poster woman is RF Kuang, 29, whose fantasies Babel and Katabasis combine a breathlessly excitable tone more familiar from children\u2019s fiction with dark academia settings, weighty questions of history and philosophy, and bursts of ultraviolence. <\/p>\n

\"Audience<\/p>\n

Romantasy fans at an event with Rebecca Yarros, one of the genre\u2019s leading lights<\/p>\n

CJ RIVERA\/INVISION\/AP<\/p>\n

Rachel Denwood, the managing director of Simon & Schuster\u2019s children\u2019s division, confirms that the publisher is moving \u201cemphatically\u201d towards NA and will soon launch \u201ca bold new global initiative in this space.\u201d <\/p>\n

But new adult is more than a publishing buzzword. It serves to highlight the emergence of a new life phase as well. In previous generations, an 18-year-old might have had little in common with a 30-year-old. In this economy, however, the 30-year-old is perhaps just as likely to be living under their parents\u2019 roof. These readers are old enough to have had a few chastening experiences with class A drugs, Tinder hook-ups and crappy landlords, but are still finding adulthood frightening and unrewarding. They still crave some of the comforts of childhood. <\/p>\n

Sharmaine Lovegrove, a former publishing executive at Hachette who has just established herself as an agent, says she\u2019s been fascinated by the emergence of NA. \u201cIt\u2019s a shorthand for stories about trying to find independence,\u201d she says. \u201cIt\u2019s where your parents are still in your life, a sort of suspended adulthood, and you\u2019re trying to find your way in the world but struggling to take action.\u201d <\/p>\n

Lovegrove points out that this tricky period of finding your way in the world, buying a property and starting a family, used to represent about five years of your life: \u201cNow it\u2019s more like 15 years.\u201d <\/p>\n

Teenagers had to be invented too. Before the 1950s, no one really thought of 13 to 19-year-olds as a distinct category of consumer. Then marketers figured out their commercial power and suddenly a whole industry sprung up to console and exploit them. <\/p>\n

What does this latest development tell us about the way society has changed since then? When you read fiction addressed to past generations of twentysomething women \u2014 Barbara Pym\u2019s novels about wry spinsters<\/a>, Laurie Colwin\u2019s charming comedies of 1970s singledom, even the terminally messy Bridget Jones \u2014 there is always a romance about being part of the adult world. These are books that immediately put some distance between you and your teenage self.<\/p>\n

\"Photo<\/p>\n

Laurie Colwin\u2019s books include Goodbye Without Leaving and Family Happiness<\/p>\n

ALAMY<\/p>\n

There are certainly modern writers who capture this time with depth and maturity; there\u2019s a reason Sally Rooney is so popular, and critically acclaimed too. But the presiding message of much of the NA fiction is that there aren\u2019t really any rewards \u2014 in the real world, at least. There isn\u2019t really much in being an adult to look forward to. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How is the messy girl trend working for you? Have you been \u201csmoking like a chimney\u201d and \u201cpulling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":21239,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[489,156,111,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-21238","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-newzealand","12":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21238","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21238"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21238\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21239"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21238"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21238"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21238"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}