The book was shortlisted for the 1995 Aurealis Awards for Excellence in Australian Speculative Fiction - Horror Division - Best Novel.

[2] The first edition cover published by Picador in 1995 features the tagline "an uncompromising love story" underneath the title, and while the novel does explore a no strings attached sexual relationship, Ettler has been adamant in stating that the novel was not about love (rather the misguided pursuit of it) nor was it intended to be erotic or romantic.

The novel concerns the pursuits of the protagonist Justine, a university student in inner-city Sydney, and her relationship with the destructive, abusive narcissist Sade, a well-paid journalist for a trashy rock magazine.

They regularly consume hard drugs, and are absorbed in a heavy capitalist culture with fluid, occasionally sexually violent open relationships.

The novel makes overt references to Brett Easton Ellis's American Psycho (1991), a work of similar tone and parody about empty consumerist culture and the emotionally absent sex lives of yuppies in Manhattan, much as The River Ophelia is about wealthy Sydneysiders with empty, drug-addled lives that are “successful” only at a surface level.

Some praised it for its sardonic and satirical approach to the morally impoverished lives of privileged young white university students and yuppies in Sydney's upper-class suburbs, while others dismissed it as being too obscene, violent and sexually explicit.

[citation needed] The cover of the first edition was printed and stuck on poles in inner-city Sydney and Melbourne in 1995, while Ettler herself did numerous publicity, including morning talk shows and television as well as radio interviews.

In the 1990s, The River Ophelia was added to the Higher School Certificate reading list in the Australian secondary education system.