What I’m looking for

I’m looking for intelligent, original fiction that grapples with deep emotion and sings on the line level. For me, the voice is key: I want to find work that can give me a sense of character in the first page, and then leverage that voice to tell a great story. Because there’s never a great story without great, messy, emotional characters. I’m not often swayed by specific tropes; if your work surprises, captivates, and enchants, then I would like to see it.

In ADULT FICTION, I am looking for literary contemporary titles with a strong female focus—novels which are unexpected in their storytelling while being intimately familiar in themes and emotions. These stories can be speculative or realistic, funny or bleak (or both, or neither), structurally inventive or starkly linear. Whatever they do, I want to see perspicacious writing that grapples with the world around us while keeping that personal pulse of emotional intensity at its core. Novels of this type which I have loved include Luster by Raven Leilani, The Guest by Emma Cline, and On the Calculation of Volume by Solvej Balle.

Upmarket and bookclub novels. These are the hardest to quantify: some of my favourite books in this category are Circe by Madeline Miller, Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus, The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, and The Safekeep by Yael van Der Wouden. Great upmarket and bookclub novels can be almost anything at all, so long as they achieve the trinity of being cleverly conceived, beautifully written, and deeply accessible.

Genre titles in fantasy and horror. For me, there are few genres better-suited to exploring our own world and selves than these two; great novels in this category tend to present us with either a mirror, forcing us to reevaluate the known, or a window, showing us something we might not otherwise see. My tastes in this area tend to run the gamut: I love anything from historical romantasy—if you can balance heart (and heat!), plot, and world building anything like Freya Marske can, then please get in touch!—to urban fantasy and academic settings (think Leigh Bardugo’s Ninth House or R.F. Kuang’s Katatbasis), to newly created worlds that may or may not draw from ours (I’m a big fan of C.S. Pacat, who I think does this really well). But that’s by no means exhaustive. Body horror is a yes, lightly speculative novels can be wonderful, and frankly if you can surprise me then all the better.

The YA AND CROSSOVER titles I gravitate towards most are often deeply political while providing a cracking good story: the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, The Spirit Bares its Teeth by Andrew Joseph White, and If These Wings Could Fly by Kyrie McCauley are some of my favourites. YA is also the place to be inventive, with new twists on old tropes, high-concept hooks (ideas you can pitch in a sentence) and perspectives we rarely get to see.

I am not currently accepting NON-FICTION submissions except by referral.