Everyone is reading about quitting. The cosy boom is a country daydreaming about life after work.

Walk into any bookshop this summer and you will find a table that was not there five years ago: soft-coloured covers, gentle fonts, titles about bakeries and bookshops and tea, and not a great deal at stake in any of them. The trade calls it cosy fiction, and it has gone from a niche to one of the most dependable things in publishing. Readers cannot get enough of low-stakes stories in which very little goes wrong.

The book that lit the fuse is worth your evening, if you have somehow missed it. Travis Baldree's Legends & Lattes — not new; it arrived a few years ago and became a word-of-mouth phenomenon — has a premise that could have been written to this paper's brief. A battle-worn orc mercenary, having spent her whole life fighting for a living, hangs up her sword and opens a coffee shop. That is the plot. No dark lord, no prophecy, no war to win. The drama is whether the espresso machine behaves and whether the regulars come back. It is a fantasy novel in which the fantasy is early retirement and a small business you love.

What makes it land — and what makes the whole genre worth taking seriously rather than waving away as comfort food — is the longing underneath it. These books are not really about cafes. They are about the dream of putting down work that has stopped meaning anything and picking up work, or rest, that does. The orc does not stop being busy; she chooses a different kind of busy, one that yields a good flat white and a place for people to sit, rather than a body count. Strip away the swords and you have the exact question this publication exists to ask: when you no longer have to fight for your living, what do you actually want to do with the day?

It is no accident the boom arrived now. We are living through the early, anxious chapters of a change in what work is and how much of it there will be, and a culture frightened of a question tends to answer it sideways — in its stories well before its politics. The competence fantasy, the novel or series about someone quietly, satisfyingly good at one small useful thing, and the cosy escape are two halves of the same daydream: a life of meaning at human scale, without the grind. Our shelves are rehearsing the post-work life before we have worked out how to pay for it.

You could call this escapism, and sometimes it is, and that is allowed — needing a soft place to land at the end of a hard day is itself a real answer to what an evening is for. But the best of these books are braver than escape. They model a future that is neither a dystopia of robots nor a utopia of idleness, but something smaller and more believable: people discovering, after work, that the thing they wanted was never the career. It was the cafe.

Worth your evening: Legends & Lattes is widely available in UK paperback, ebook and audio, and through most libraries; it is a two- or three-evening read and the gentlest possible way in. If it lands, the prequel Bookshops & Bonedust is the obvious next pour. And if you would rather have the feeling on screen, reach for a good slow-stakes drama where the crisis is a village fete rather than the end of the world — the appetite is the same, and so is what it is quietly telling us about what we are hoping for.