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For a long time, the polite word for it was undemanding. Gentle novels, the warm and low-stakes kind where nobody is brutalised, and the worst wound usually heals, were treated as the literary equivalent of a hot water bottle, comforting, faintly embarrassing, not quite serious. That judgment is now looking badly out of date. Across bestseller charts, library borrowing figures and the endless scroll of BookTok, the softest books on the shelf have become one of the most powerful forces in publishing, and the people who once waved them away are having to explain why so many readers are choosing tenderness on purpose.