Milly Reilly

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For the past two years I’ve been working with Jo, assisting on her list of authors, and I’m now building my own list of fiction and non-fiction writers. When it comes to novels, for me it is all about people. I love character-driven stories that delve deep into internal lives and the ways that people reveal themselves in friendships, families, and romantic relationships. I’m drawn to writing that deals with darkness and complexity but is not without hope; writing that’s playful and poetic with characters that stay with me long after I finish reading. Some authors I love are Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Zadie Smith, Colm Tóibín, Arundhati Roy, Ross Raisin, Helen Oyeyemi, and Meena Kandasamy. I’m not looking for sci-fi or crime.

On the non-fiction side, I’m interested in memoir and narrative non-fiction, human behaviour, illness and medicine, the social and political. Examples of non-fiction books I admire are Simon Baron-Cohen’s Zero Degrees of Empathy, Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race, Juno Mac and Molly Smith’s Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Workers’ Rights, and Sigrid Rausing’s memoir Mayhem.