Jessica Lee

I'm an Associate Agent here at A.M. Heath, actively building a list of literary and general fiction and non-fiction. This includes HÄN Archive co-curator and journalist Anastasiia Fedorova, Ewan Gass, and Danielle Giles. Alongside Euan Thorneycroft, I also co-agent Abu Leila, winner of the 2022 Peggy Chapman-Andrews First Novel Award. 

In fiction, my taste ranges from the highly literary to novels that engage across the board. I’m drawn to a combination of formal precision and big feeling: works that package heady emotion with clarity of expression, that are textured, but not maximalist, on the level of the line. Character is important to me – the more spirited, offbeat, and finely-drawn, the better – as is a devotion to what’s conceptually fresh, that might offer new possibilities for being and relating to one another. In non-fiction, my focus is on writing that balances scholarship with a vivid personal component: literary biographies, socially-rooted memoir, cultural histories that are both lived and learned. 

I would particularly love to see: 

Historical fiction that’s animated by contemporary thought, and mines its context for atmosphere and sensuality, like Matrix by Lauren Groff, The Glutton by AK Blakemore, or Briefly, A Delicious Life by Nell Stevens 

Artful, hybrid novels – Kick the Latch by Kathryn Scanlan, The Extinction of Irena Ray by Jennifer Croft, Thread Ripper by Amalie Smith 

Love and / or family stories that attend to the mess of human relationships – either comedic and life-affirming, like Rebecca K Reilly’s Greta & Valdin, sweeping and intimate like Kaveh Akbar’s Martyr!, or very very tender, like Caleb Azumah Nelson’s Small Worlds 

Novels that use surreal, dystopic, magical realist or horrifying elements to unsettle established modes of being: Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh, The Doloriad by Missouri Williams, Carpentaria by Alexis Wright 

Queer theory-inflected social histories like Gay Bar by Jeremy Atherton Lin, Testo Junkie by Paul B. Preciado, or Raving by McKenzie Wark 

Do send your submissions to me via our Submissions portal. I’d be very glad to read.