‘It’s more than just fairy smut’: Inside the UK’s first romantasy bookshop

Between enemies-to-lovers and ‘shadow daddies’, BookTok has fallen in love with the spicy stories combining romance and fantasy. But there is more to the subgenre than sex, say the fans who queued for hours outside the brick-and-mortar Oxford store ‘We left Warrington at 5.15am this morning to get here,” Emma tells me, standing in a queue that stretches down Walton Street. It is just after 9am on a Saturday in Oxford, the students are still in bed and the tourists have yet to descend on the c...

By Emma Loffhagen