Sarah Turnbull is its doyenne: the journalist can be neatly described as a J.K. Rowling for young Australian women dreaming of romantic magic abroad.

Turnbull has shifted more than 250,000 copies of her memoir, Almost French, in Australia since its release five years ago. Almost French, like the Harry Potter series, could never be called the architect of its genre, but in a country that starts using the term 'best-seller' when sales top 10,000, Turnbull has been responsible for a thorough renovation.

After 13 years in France and Tahiti, Turnbull returned to live in Australia in November and to pitch a proposal for her second book, which she refuses to discuss beyond describing it as non-fiction.

'I tried writing fiction but returning to non-fiction has been a bit of a weight off my mind,' she says. 'I found fiction a struggle.'

Turnbull had read few travel memoirs when Random House encouraged her to turn her manuscript into a more personal account.

'There is some pressure from publishers to have authors put more of themselves into it. In my case they were right. The book that I proposed would have been very dry to read,' she says.

Few of the expatriate authors who have followed her have shown much reluctance to reveal themselves. Most offer minor twists on the Turnbull template of the wanderlustful journalist looking for love. The real departure for many expatriates who took to the page after Turnbull has been their willingness to purge the quotidian and the odd personal details.

Since last August, the travel section of Australian bookshops has found space for Buying a Piece of Paris: Finding a Key to the City of Love, Ellie Nielsen's account of extending her mortgage to a Parisian flat; Suzanna Clarke's A House in Fez, about renovating a life and a home in Morocco; Lavender and Linen, the second offering from Henrietta Taylor, a landlady in the south of France; Paprika Paradise, James Jeffrey's exploration of his Hungarian roots; See Naples and Die, Penelope Green's second book on Italy; The View from the Valley of Hell by Mark Willacy, the ABC's former Middle East correspondent; A Town Like Paris, a male slant on the genre's favourite city by Bryce Corbett; and Carmen Michael's Chasing Bohemia: A Year of Living Recklessly in Rio de Janeiro. Finding Nino by Marc Llewellyn, out in May, offers two twists: the expatriate author in Italy is male and a father.

All but two of the authors above are journalists, and while back-cover blurbs promise tales of professionals throwing away glamorous careers for a simpler life abroad, most expatriate memoirs are by hacks carving another notch in their CVs.

British and American travel memoirs swing between literary efforts and stories heavy with humour and gimmicks, such as carrying a fridge around a country. Geoff Dyer and Bill Bryson are rare literary funnymen.

The Australian books seldom bother with much beyond straightforward, linear stories of jumping the rut at home. The clearest nod to literature is the tendency to explore the new habitat through the writer's emotional journey. Novelistic narratives are held together with minor characters and strings of dialogue from often mundane conversations held years earlier.

Alexis Harley of Melbourne's La Trobe University says expatriate memoirs report on the familiar, whereas the traditional travel book has a fascination with the unknown.

'What surprises me is that it's often not the most gorgeous writing and the insights are not all that profound. They are going to what they know and they are only seeing what they already know,' she says.

Some authors can be 'almost nauseatingly Europhile', adds Harley. 'The gorgeousness of

their Parises and Romes - the transformative effects of being there - don't ring very true. They offer a romanticised vision of these places. It's a self-deluding belief that the authors have or construct for the sake of the narrative ... Maybe it's the fashion for self-exploration that's prompting this spate of

travel memoirs.'

After 17 years in London, Wagga Wagga's Andrew Mueller returned to Australia last year hoping for recognition as one of Britain's top rock music critics and a seasoned correspondent on international conflicts.

He soon understood why Picador had stripped most of the music out of his new book, I Wouldn't Start From Here, apart from the flattering blurb from Bono on the back cover, to focus on his exploits in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Balkans and the Gaza Strip.

Mueller attributes the popularity of straightforward travel tales to Australia's remoteness. Gimmicks are pointless when the readership is so gripped by the foreign country, although he questions why journalists would settle for the worn paths. 'They're creating the story rather than finding it,' Mueller says. 'It's an easy thing to do. You have to do less research and less work because the story is just about you.

'It does strike me as an inversion of the usual journalistic principle, which is to gaze outward, whereas these books all seem to be about 'me'. That is the nature of memoir, but traditionally the memoir has been about something somebody did, rather than a thing they did in order to have something to write a memoir about.

'Publishing is like the music business. What everyone wants is something that's a little bit like the last thing that sold a skip-load of copies. Any mass trend has the same dynamic,' Mueller says.

'At the heart of any of these [trends] you will find two or three fantastic, exceptional things going on, which people will read or

listen to for years and years, and surrounding them is a constellation of ambulance chasers and bandwagon-jumpers that you won't remember next Christmas.'

Which brings us back to one of the victims of the rise of expatriate memoirs. Brian Castro, the Australian novelist whose Chinese mother gave birth to him on the Macau ferry, has handed in the manuscript for what he suspects will be his last work of fiction. Riled by the publishing industry's disregard for his challenging novels, he's retiring to focus on non-fiction.

Castro says he is exasperated by young writers with one aggressively marketed book who outshine his eight award-winning novels and two non-fiction titles.

His luck dipped in 1999 and 2000 when he 'fell through the cracks' of the major publishers

with his autobiographical novel Shanghai Dancing.

'A reader for a major publisher suggested a straight memoir and another publisher's reader said the work was too literary,' he says.

By the time he had walked away from the big firms and taken Shanghai Dancing to the smaller Giramondo, Castro knew the publishers had been angling for him to write a form of expatriate 'me-moir'.

Castro waved back to the big publishers when Shanghai Dancing won two major Australian literary awards, but he admits to wincing as sales mounted for memoirs by 'tourist writers, who really should be writing hotel supplements for weekend tabloids'.

'With all the publicity, no one knows how to discriminate any more,' Castro says. 'Every time the puff or the blurb or the reviews come out I start to disbelieve them. And I think people are starting to realise that too - that when you get the real material, a lot of spin has gone before it, and the real stuff isn't that good. I'm starting to despair over that.'