Maria Brannan

She has wide-ranging tastes in fiction and is interested in writing for adult and new adult/crossover readers. She loves character-driven and high concept novels that combine intelligent writing with a commercial hook and is always looking for stories that explore under-represented and diverse experiences with authenticity and sensitivity.

She has a passion for genre fiction, especially fantasy and horror. In fantasy she looks for memorable characters and vivid world-building and is open to epic, cosy, dark or romantic stories. She has long been a fan of authors such as Joe Abercrombie, Scott Lynch, Garth Nix and Tamora Pierce and more recent favourites include The Poet Empress, This Kingdom Will Not Kill Me, The Raven Scholar, The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue, The Will of the Many, The Teller of Small Fortunes, Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries and Babel.

In horror, she's looking for narratives with a unique perspective or concept that can send a chill down your spine, from the lush historical vampiric gothic of The Quick to the contemporary smart humour of Grady Hendrix's How to Sell a Haunted House, as well as more thoughtful and literary stories like The Only Good Indians or the folk horror/religious sensibility of The Loney. Explorations of female rage and women's experiences such as Slewfoot, Natural Beauty and The Eyes are the Best Part will also always pique her interest. She would also love to find a great horror romance.

Continuing the unnerving theme, she enjoys high-concept thrillers with a great hook in the vein of The Last House on Needless Street or The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, and twisty atmospheric crime writing like Alex North's The Whisper Man or Alex Pavesi’s Eight Detectives.

On the other end of the spectrum she loves heartfelt, emotive stories with deep humanity and warmth such as Before the Coffee Gets Cold, Lessons in Chemistry and The One Hundred Years of Lenni and Margo. She is also keen on voice-led, relationship focused contemporary fiction, such as Intermezzo and Love, Marriage, as well as thoughtful, incisive speculative stories like Lonely Castle in the Mirror. In the more upmarket and literary space she also enjoys sweeping, character-driven historical novels, such as Pachinko or James Hynes' Sparrow, as well as the myth and folklore retellings of Pat Barker and Madeline Miller.

She is always looking for a sweeping love story like The Time Traveller's Wife or on the more commercial side a rom-com that makes you fall for both of the leads such as Frederica (an older favourite) or The Love Hypothesis (a newer favourite).

On the nonfiction side, she is drawn to anything that draws the reader into the immediacy and tangibility of an author’s personal experiences, whether that’s a professional memoir like Unnatural Causes or a personal one such as Notes on Heartbreak); histories that explores overlooked or underrepresented people and events as Hallie Rubenhold does so brilliantly in The Five; and nature and science writing that evokes fascination and wonder in the reader like How to Catch a Mole or Endless Forms, both books that intrigue and act as a door into underexplored or unfamiliar worlds.