The airport novel represents a literary genre that is defined not so much by its plot or cast of stock characters, but by the social function it serves. Designed to meet the demands of a very specific market, airport novels are superficially engaging while not being necessarily profound, usually written to be more entertaining than philosophically challenging. An airport novel is typically a fairly long but fast-paced boilerplate genre-fiction novel commonly offered by airport newsstands.
Considering the marketing of fiction as a trade, airport novels occupy a niche similar to the one that once was occupied by pulp magazines and other reading materials typically sold at newsstands and kiosks to travellers. In French, such novels are called romans de gare, 'railway station novels',[1] suggesting that publishers in France were aware of this potential market at a very early date.[2] The somewhat dated Dutch term stationsroman is a calque from French.