Sara Langham
Sara is looking for literary fiction, upmarket/ crossover fiction, SFF and narrative non-fiction. Authors whose work she admires include: Ali Smith, Elizabeth Strout, Richard Powers, Miriam Toews, Hanya Yanigahara, Mieko Kawakami, Jennifer Egan, Emily St. John Mandel, Sarah Moss, Sarah Hall, Helen Garner, Katie Kitamura, Sunjeev Sahota and Gwendoline Riley.
Sara is a huge fan of speculative and genre bending fiction such as Rumaan Alam’s Leave the World Behind, Piranesi by Susanna Clarke, Mermaid of the Black Conch by Monique Roffey and literary sci-fi such as How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu and In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. She is really interested in books that address the climate crisis, such as Richard Powers Bewilderment and/ or are set in the near future. She would like to find something as original and uplifting as The Stranding by Kate Sawyer or Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and is interested in books on the edges of horror and dark comedies. In historical fiction, she is drawn to novels which find new ways of telling old stories, recent examples include Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford, Matrix by Lauren Groff and The Colony by Audrey Magee. She is looking for an edge of your seat literary thriller in the vein of Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton or something as intricately puzzling and creative as Trust by Hernan Diaz. She has recently watched Yellowjackets and would love to find something that has that same energy and story telling vibe.
In non-fiction she is interested in books where the personal is at the centre of the piece, for example, Mark O’Connell’s A Thread of Violence, Claire Dederer’s Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma or Polly Morland’s A Fortunate Woman. She’d love to find a book of autobiographical essays such as Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth or Emilie Pine’s Notes to Self
Sara assists Veronique Baxter with her list.
