I've observed a worrying mini-trend in the world of titles, which came to my attention when several people told me to read Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveller's Wife. It's an intriguing title, if a little cutesy, but I couldn't help observing that among high-profile publications in the last couple of years were Clare Chambers' The Editor's Wife and Elizabeth Hyde's The Abortionist's Daughter. You don't have to look much further in a bookshop to discover Anita Shreve's The Pilot's Wife and Philip Pullman's The Firework Maker's Daughter - not to mention Amy Tan's The Kitchen God's Wife, Kim Edwards' The Memory Keeper's Daughter, Joyce Carol Oates' The Gravedigger's Daughter, Katherine McMahon's The Alchemist's Daughter and Jostein Gaarder's The Ringmaster's Daughter - need I go on?

This is a mere sampling of the extensive range of wife and daughter novels currently available in all good bookstores. Next year will also see the publication of Diane Ackerman's The Zookeeper's Wife, Barbara Hambly's The Emancipator's Wife and Sue Miller's The Senator's Wife, and the range increases considerably if we include the world of commercial romance: Ann Mather's The Greek Tycoon's Pregnant Wife and The Desert Sheikh's Captive Wife by Lynne Graham, both from Mills and Boon, I feel are destined to be classics.

I'm sure you can guess what I'm going to say next. Whilst many of the titles above sprang to mind immediately, an extensive trawl through Amazon discovered hardly a single title of the format "the X's son" or "the Y's husband". All I could dig up was Dr Campbell's Secret Son, another Mills & Boon from the medical romance subgenre. (Cue slightly dated picture of hunky doctor with cute baby - swoon.)

Can we conclude anything from this, other than that I need to spend less time reading the Bookseller? Book titles are certainly subject to trends, and this title format plays well to current fashions: publishing loves the "quirky" and grotesque, and although in one or two cases the wife or daughter gets linked with someone as boring as an editor, most of the time she is lucky enough to be linked with a gravedigger or alchemist, a ringmaster or zookeeper (we also love a touch of retro).

The focus on the wife or daughter of the main oddity plays to another motif that pervades our culture - that of taking the neglected sidekick and making them the main attraction. Reality shows take Joe (or Joanna) Normal and show him or her to be a superstar, which gives hope to all of us whose best claim to fame remains "I was at college with that actor guy, but I didn't really know him that well". A handy formula for a magazine feature is "X gets all the attention - but why don't we focus on the far more interesting and neglected Y?" The story of the neglected finally receiving their just deserts is one we love to hear: not just because we can cast ourselves in the same role, but also because we can experience a warm moral glow at the underdog getting their due.

So all these novels seem to take the reader with them in a little conspiracy: others may think that the time traveller, kitchen god or Greek tycoon is the main attraction - and indeed, they're pretty intriguing - but come with me and I'll show you the wife or daughter in the background who really deserves the attention. This is exactly what Carol Ann Duffy did in her collection The World's Wife, which introduces pithy and perceptive characters like Queen Herod, Mrs Rip Van Winkle and Frau Freud.

So far, so encouraging; weak women emerge from the sidelines; victims get the limelight. But I'm sceptical. For a start, there's no reason - in this day and age! - that the woman shouldn't be the time traveller, Greek tycoon or gravedigger herself; the retro aesthetic that takes us back to a more or less imaginary age of alchemists and ringmasters also takes us back to a time when women were stuck being sidekicks and stalwarts.

Why are we so obsessed with fantastic returns to such social arrangements? And are literary novelists who do so really any different from romance writers who dream of being overwhelmed by an untamed desert sheikh? It's particularly odd in the case of The Editor's Wife, given that most editors are now female and given that they have plenty of say over book titles. Editors, please! What's next - The Rhinoceros Tamer's Great-Granddaughter? Actually, I think that might do rather well.