I founded LBA Ltd with Luigi and Alison in 2005. I have been an agent for over 20 years and work with a network of publishers based all over the world. I run the Good Housekeeping Competition with GHK and Orion. In 2018, I won the RNA Literary Agent of the Year award.

I represent a wide range of best-selling and award-winning authors across fiction and non-fiction. I love working with authors and their publishing teams to build them into brand names – as with top Sunday Times bestsellers Lesley Kara, Simon Kernick, Heidi Swain and Karen Swan. I work closely with authors on their manuscripts, developing and championing their work, with a view to carving out a long-term writing career for them in the UK and internationally.

Whether commercial or reading-group, I like innovative and well-written stories that hook me in from the start and whose voice stays with me. I want books that demand to be talked about and shared, whatever their genre, and that I’m still thinking about days after finishing. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng and Elizabeth is Missing by Emma Healey are two of my favourite books.

For crime, I’m looking for high-concept thrillers (whether contemporary or historical) which are character-driven and have that ‘what if?’ or ‘locked room’ plot structure, crime series which main protagonists aren’t necessarily a police person or detective, and unputdownable psychological suspense. I love The Hunting Party by Lucy Foley, Lullaby by Leila Slimani and anything by Shari Lapena or Lisa Jewell.

For women’s fiction, I’m looking for wonderful love stories like The Man Who Didn’t Call by Rosie Walsh or The Flat Share by Beth O’Leary, reading group historical fiction like The Doll Factory by Elizabeth Macneal or The Familiars by Stacey Halls and novels that have a discussable issue at its heart, with characters who won’t let me go such as Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid and Big Little Lies by Liane Moriarty.

I’m not looking for fantasy, science fiction, children’s fiction or poetry.