A debut novel about a lonely old woman who has fallen through the cracks of society has wowed publishers at this week’s Frankfurt book fair, with 10 presses fighting to win a book that is being compared to the smash hit Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.

The television producer Beth Morrey’s first novel, The Love Story of Missy Carmichael, has emerged as one of the biggest titles among a deluge of fiction following the trend for uplifting literature, or “up-lit”. Selling to HarperCollins for a six-figure sum after a 10-way auction, the novel finds elderly Missy Carmichael living alone with her husband gone, her daughter not speaking to her and her son in Australia – until she adopts a dog.

Morrey, who works three days a week for RDF, wrote the novel while on maternity leave with her son at the end of 2016. “My husband suggested we put him in nursery two days a week so I could write a book,” she said. “It took me three months. I basically emptied it out, and enjoyed it more than anything I’ve ever done.”

After a terrible year “with all those celebrities dying, Brexit and Trump,” she continued, “I wanted to write a book that could make people cry, but with happiness, not sadness. I felt like we needed a bit of catharsis. It’s what I wanted for myself – that washed-out crying feeling. Everyone wants to know things will be OK on a micro level. Obviously on a macro level we’re all doomed but if you can read a book and feel a bit happier then that’s no bad thing.”

Literary agent Madeleine Milburn, who sold the book, said she hadn’t “felt this strongly about a character since the day I met Eleanor Oliphant”.

Martha Ashby, who acquired it for HarperCollins, said readers were “gravitating towards stories that leave them feeling hopeful and reassured with the world; books that remind us that it isn’t all bad”.

“I’ve seen a lot of submissions that could comfortably fit in this area, but what I loved and felt significantly different about Beth’s novel was that it never felt saccharine or that it was pandering to the reader,” said Ashby. “It felt very real and very honest, and even shone a bit of light on to some issues that we as a society are less than comfortable talking about: loneliness, old age, and how to ask for help when you need it most.”

Sam Eades, editor at Orion imprint Trapeze, said there had been a deluge of up-lit titles this year, with fewer stories of women in peril. “It’s just been unbelievable,” she said, “it’s the resounding trend of the fair. These feelgood books tap into mental health and loneliness and anxiety and trauma. By the end of the book the characters will have formed friendships, and been swept into a community.”

Eades bid and lost out on another much-talked-about title in the genre, Clare Pooley’s The Authenticity Project, which sold for a six-figure sum. But she won rights in Ella Dove’s Five Steps to Happy, the semi-autobiographical story of how a terrible accident changes the life of a struggling actress.

“I think up-lit is kind of inspirational memoir in fiction,” Eades said. “How do you find happiness? How do you find a sense of community? The world is so awful that people are turning to fiction to find a happy ending.”

The biggest non-fiction at this year’s fair also had a distinctly female, empowering flavour: rights were selling around the world in Amia Srinivasan’s The Right to Sex, which tackles topics including male sexual entitlement, rape culture and #MeToo. Srinivasan is associate professor of philosophy at St John’s College, Oxford, and a contributing editor to the London Review of Books.

Auctions are ongoing, with a US deal already topping seven figures for US journalist Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women, an account of how the author spent eight years with three women learning every detail of their erotic and romantic lives.

“The non-fiction feels dominated by women – but actually it’s not straightforward feminism or response to #MeToo, it’s much more empowering than that,” said Curtis Brown agent Cathryn Summerhayes, who is selling Taddeo’s book and has also conducted a 15-way auction for food critic Grace Dent’s memoir Hungry. “There’s a new hunger for real books about real women’s desires and needs. They are not just books for women, though – and I think that’s a change because we are hopefully moving towards equal billing rather than accepting slight improvements in our pay, work, lives etc but not parity. Men need to read them as much as women do.”