Alina Elkin

Alina is looking for select new adult and adult fiction. Across categories, she's drawn to emotionally intense stories with a strong hook, morally complicated characters, and heroines who make questionable choices. With a background in international rights, she reads every manuscript with translation potential in mind.

• Sports romance. New Adult and college-set romances with real heat, especially those centered on sports that still feel fresh on the page: swimming, figure skating, gymnastics, or anything beyond the familiar worlds of hockey and Formula 1.
• Romance with fanfiction roots. Contemporary or fantasy romance that began in fandom but has been fully transformed into an original story with its own world, characters, and identity.
• Romantic suspense and romantic thrillers. Stories in which the romance and the danger are inseparable, each sharpening the other. She is drawn to morally complicated characters, villains who pose a genuine threat, and twists that change the reader’s understanding of everything that came before. Colleen Hoover’s Verity is a touchstone, as is Ashley Elston’s First Lie Wins.
• Dark romantasy. Particularly fairy-tale and myth retellings with sensuality, menace, and bite. Think the gothic atmosphere of Rachel Gillig’s One Dark Window and the darker romantic intensity of Liv Zander’s Crown Me Dead.
• Upmarket and book club fiction. She is especially drawn to strong female voices and stories about womanhood, dysfunctional families, and intense family relationships, whether contemporary or historical. Her tastes range from Bonnie Garmus’s Lessons in Chemistry and Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful to Liz Moore’s The God of the Woods, Emma Cline’s The Guest, and Caro Claire Burke’s Yesteryear.