The Mystery of Harlequin Romance

Harlequin Enterprises Limited is a Toronto, Ontario-based company that is the world's leading publisher of series romance and women's fiction. Owned by the Torstar Corporation, the largest newspaper publisher in Canada, the company publishes nearly 110 new titles each month in 27 different languages.

Harlequin romance was founded in 1949 by publishing executive Richard Bonnycastle and started out publishing a wide range of books from Westerns to Romances to cookbooks. In 1957 Harlequin began acquiring the rights to, and publishing, novels from Mills & Boon. Due to the huge popularity of this genre, by 1964 the company was exclusively publishing romance fiction and in 1971 it purchased Mills & Boon, forming Harlequin Mills & Boon Limited in the UK.

The company that founded Harlequin romance has continued to evolve over the years, expanding with offices in New York, London, Tokyo, Milan, Sydney, Paris, Madrid, Stockholm, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Athens, Budapest, Granges-Pacot and Warsaw, as well as licensing agreements in nine other countries. It has also expanded its range of books, offering everything from thrillers and commercial literary fiction.

As of 2005, Harlequin romance is the only major player in, though Avalon, Avon and other publishers are slowly gaining momentum, publishing dozens of titles per month in ten-plus different lines, ranging from clean stories geared to the Christian reader, to the semi-erotic. Some publishers of Regency romances and ethnic romances also publish in monthly series.

Some of the latest titles of harlequin romance books are:

Meant-To-Be Mother
The Nanny and the Sheikh
The Businessman's Bride
Outback Man Seeks Wife
An Unlikely Family
From Out of the Blue
Who Needs Cupid?
A Time To Come Home
Montana Skies
Whose Lie Is It Anyway?

Harlequin romance books have been translated in all languages over the world and are the most popular books on the market for romance. Mainly women read the books as men are not really up to read these kind of books. For them it is mostly a “chick flick” book.

Some of Harlequin romance books have been adapted for television series such as “a Change of Place”, “the Awakening” or “The Waiting Game” but maybe the most popular one is Bridget Jones. She is a fictional character created by English writer Helen Fielding. Fielding first published Bridget Jones' stories in the form of a diary in English newspaper columns in The Independent and later The Daily Telegraph.

In this Harlequin romance book, they chronicled the life of Bridget Jones, a thirty something singleton woman living in London, surrounded by a surrogate "urban family" of friends as she tries to make sense of life and love in the 1990s. Often hysterically funny, the column accurately lampooned the obsession of women with women's magazines such as Cosmopolitan and wider societal trends in Britain at the time.

If you are a big fan of Harlequin romance, you can buy your books online on sites like Harlequinb.com, or even Amazon. Some sites offer the books for free if your join their book club.

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