Two new novels, The Heir Apparent and Royal Spin, offer a glimpse behind the curtain of royal life
The British royal family is the subject of two new popular fiction titles, Royal Spin and The Heir Apparent. (Getty Images/Max Mumby/Indigo)
In 2016, Netflix TV hit The Crown captivated audiences with its exquisite melding of fact and fiction as it retold the familiar story of the British royal family.
That first series and the five that followed felt new and shocking, and 73 million households globally tuned in.
But literature has long drawn on royal lives for inspiration. In historical fiction, the peppering of fact with deliberate make-believe and occasional wild supposition is accepted as artistic licence.
Now, royal fiction is charting new waters, responding to what book publishers hope is a bottomless public obsession with all things royal.
Denmark's Queen Mary and King Frederik, pictured here in 2023 before their coronation, will arrive in Australia on March 14 for a much-anticipated five-day state visit. ( Ritzau Scanpix/Claus Fisker via Reuters)
This fresh crop of addictive yarns is deliberately aimed at a younger audience.
The tone and style steal from the frothy romance genre that is having its own renaissance, but its plot mashups set in royal palaces are underpinned with tales ripped from newspaper headlines, social media feeds, and royal biographies — Prince Harry's memoir Spare comes to mind — and peopled with characters that seem not just plausible but downright recognisable.
Yes, names are changed and character traits are blurred to ensure there's no risk of defamation, but the result has the tantalising sense of a curtain being lifted to reveal the truth behind the daily gossip fuelling a royal media circus that never lets up.
A royal rom-com
Omid Scobie is the former British royal correspondent whose debut non-fiction title Finding Freedom — a controversial and bestselling account of Harry and his wife Meghan's battles within the 'Firm' — caused a global tsunami with its shocking revelations.
Finding Freedom's follow-up, Endgame, discussed what Scobie perceived to be "the monarchy's fight for survival", and was less successful commercially but feels pertinent in hindsight.
His latest, Royal Spin, released in February, breaks into fiction, a potentially safer (and more lucrative) environment for the author.
Author Omid Scobie describes the world of Royal Spin as an "alternate royal universe". (Supplied: Hachette Australia)
The star of this story — with its perky rom-com cover — is American press officer Lauren Morgan, who moves from the White House to Buckingham Palace and suffers extreme culture shock as she encounters a fortress of tradition, stuffy aides and frustrating rules, including a diktat to wear pantyhose.
She also meets the devilishly handsome Duke of Exeter, a royal renegade summoned back into the fold to fix the monarchy's image problems following accusations of racism and its failure to address its colonialist past.
Scobie says he started thinking about this book in 2014 when he was in Australia as part of the UK rota covering the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's inaugural state visit with baby Prince George in tow.
"I was at Taronga Zoo in Sydney watching the press assistants faff around about something that was really very benign," he says.
Prince George had thrown a temper tantrum in front of the world's press, flinging a just-gifted toy bilby to the floor. Hold the front page!
"I started scribbling private notes about the kind of behind-the-scenes chaos that happens all the time covering the royals," Scobie says.
"Every now and then I would share my notes with my editors and we would all laugh. But I always knew there was a story about the absurdity of that world."
Scobie says that during his 12 years on the royal beat he constantly found himself asking, 'what if?'.
"What if the palace actually released a well-worded statement that wasn't a no comment? What if they hired the diversity tsars that they said they were going to [to address the lack of representation in royal staffing]?"
An insider's view
As time passed, Scobie realised he had an unparalleled ringside seat to the royal machine.
It provided the starting point for Royal Spin, which Scobie co-wrote with Robin Benway, a successful YA author from the US.
The duo wrote the first 60 pages, which was then passed around the London Book Fair. A bidding war ensued.
Scobie with his co-author Benway, who won the 2017 National Book Award for Young People's Literature for her YA novel Far from the Tree. (Supplied: Hachette Australia)
Despite featuring characters and storylines obviously influenced by the current royal family, Scobie is adamant the book is complete fiction.
"We didn't want people to say, 'That's the Harry and Meghan saga, that's Prince Andrew etc'. But I did want people, despite it being fictional, to be able to read and see and learn how the royal press office actually works — how a comms [communications] officer would work with a journalist, the lines that are tested in that relationship.
"And then what crisis looks like in the Buckingham Palace press office and what that press office really looks like — this squeaky, unoiled machine handling business for one of the most important institutions in Britain. That's the curtain pullback I wanted to bring, coming from someone who's covered this world for such a long time."
Scobie describes the characters of Royal Spin as amalgams of "the types you meet in that space", but the idea of an American confronted with British froideur was surely influenced by what he saw when Meghan came on the scene.
"I remember when Harry first took Meghan into Kensington Palace and she was just the girlfriend at the time. She was hugging everyone — 'I'm a hugger' — and I remember one staff member later talking [disparagingly] about that interaction. To them it was tedious and annoying."
The book has just been picked up by US streaming network NBC.
"I see it as Veep meets The West Wing meets Devil Wears Prada," Scobie quips.
A family story at heart
Scobie believes at the heart of our fascination with the royals is "the story of a functional family that weirdly shares a lot of the same dysfunctions that we experience in our own families".
Australian journalist and debut novelist Rebecca Armitage, author of The Heir Apparent, agrees.
The issues that play out in the royal family — infidelity, marriage breakdown, sibling rivalry — are the same issues that play out in regular families, Armitage told ABC Nightlife. (Supplied)
Working from Tasmania on the ABC's digital international desk, Armitage fell into royal reporting.
"Sometimes royal coverage is dismissed as frivolous, like celebrity entertainment, but I found that there was a voracious appetite on the part of the audience for serious stories delving into history.
"I started to look for patterns in the family dynamics, and those stories did even better."
The core readers for her royal stories were women under the age of 45, an audience the ABC was keen to engage.
Around the time of Prince Harry's wedding in 2018, Armitage became hooked on the Sussex duo.
"I thought Harry looked very stressed and I didn't know why," she says.
"I now have a theory that he has no poker face and, much like Diana his mother and unlike other members of his family who have that stiff upper lip, emotions are quite plain on his face.
"We now know there was a lot of tension behind the scenes and that gave me this thought of what happens if you're born royal, something we see as the ultimate lottery ticket, but then you don't want it."
A celebrity book club hit
After five years of thinking about it, Armitage wrote the novel in just six months.
The Heir Apparent tells the story of Lexi Villiers, a 29-year-old Brit doing her medical residency in Hobart when a royal aide secretly flies in to whisk her back to the UK to face her destiny.
The idea for a novel about a wayward royal came to Armitage in 2018 when she was covering the Sussex wedding for the ABC. (Supplied: HarperCollins Australia)
Lexi is really Princess Alexandrina, born third in line to the throne and now heir apparent following the tragic death of her father and twin brother.
She is haunted by her mother's untimely death in a boating accident and estranged from her family. But will she now commit to a life of duty and service?
"I used the scaffolding of the House of Windsor to build the fictional house of Villiers," says Armitage, who faced initial rejection from literary agents.
In desperation, she embarked on "literary speed dating", an industry event at which authors have two minutes to pitch to publishers and agents.
"After that, my entire life changed in the space of two days," she says.
Armitage received a six-figure pre-empt deal to publish her novel in Australia and the US.
The novel was published in November 2025 and chosen the following month by Hollywood star Reese Witherspoon's influential book club, catapulting the novel to bestseller status.
"Ultimately, the royals are living under some of the most unique circumstances you could ever imagine, and that's why this world is such a good setting for a story, because it's a family, but a family on steroids," says Armitage, who is now in discussions for a screen adaptation.
Meanwhile, the real royal world continues to spin out a barrage of potential plot lines to entice future novelists, putting publishers firmly on notice. Royal fiction is the new chick lit.
Royal Spin is published by Sceptre and The Heir Apparent is published by HarperCollins Australia.