Juliet Mushens

“High concept hooks, beautiful writing and page turning plots are what I’m looking for”

Juliet Mushens has been an agent for over a decade. More than a dozen of her clients are Sunday Times bestsellers with half a dozen claiming the number one slot in the last two years alone. Her clients include million-copy no. 1 bestseller Jessie Burton, multi-million copy NY Times bestseller Taran Matharu, record-breaking multi-million copy no. 1 bestseller Richard Osman. The Times ran a piece recognising her as the first agent to represent the number 1, 2 and 3 UK bestsellers in the same week: ‘Star literary agent first to top the charts three times’, a feat she repeated in 2022. Juliet sits on the advisory board of Book Brunch and is currently President of the British Fantasy Society. You can find her on twitter as @mushenska.

Submitting to Juliet

Juliet is looking for: adult fiction across the genres – from reading group, to SFF, and most things in between. She has had major success selling crime/thriller, historical fiction, fantasy and reading group fiction and is actively focusing on these areas currently. She is naturally drawn to books with high concept hooks, and page-turning plots. She grew up reading a blend of literary classics, doorstopper fantasy and fanfiction – so her taste is broad!

Juliet’s taste in books: she is looking for novels which make for good book-club reads (she is a fan of The List by Yomi Adegoke, Such A Fun Age by Kiley Reid, We Need to Talk About Kevin by Lionel Shriver); historical fiction which centres characters often side lined by history (some of her favourite books in this area are Dissolution by CJ Sansom, The Book of Night Women by Marlon James, Fingersmith by Sarah Waters); twisty and thrilling novels with heaps of suspense (she loves Room by Emma Donoghue, Dark Places by Gillian Flynn, Lullaby by Leïla Slimani – also a big fan of Lee Child); fantasy with immersive worldbuilding and a great sense of pace to the story be it romantasy or epic (writers like Naomi Novik, Robin Hobb, Octavia E Butler); upmarket fiction with page-turning plots (good examples being Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi); commercial women’s fiction/romance (e.g. Ali Hazelwood, Helen Hoang, Marian Keyes, Kevin Kwan).

Please do not send her: picture-books, MG, non-fiction, novellas, short stories/short story collections, screenplays or poetry collections. Please do not send her unfinished books. Unless she has specifically asked to see it, do not send her revised versions of earlier manuscripts she has rejected. Do not send her novels which her colleagues have rejected. Currently, she is less focused on: YA, dystopian novels and science-fiction.

Juliet’s Clients