Sara Shandler has spent her career working alongside other creatives. She joined The Book Group in 2025 and represents a wide range of fiction and nonfiction, including book club, psychological suspense, and high-concept romance. In nonfiction, she’s drawn to memoir and essays that marry a personal narrative with a big idea, and platform-driven nonfiction about parenting and psychology. She also represents a smaller list of contemporary YA. Sara is always looking for a great plot, a strong voice, big emotions, and unexpected humor.

Sara’s introduction to publishing began in Amherst, Massachusetts, with her can-do-anything hippie parents, who encouraged her to write the #1 New York Times bestselling book Ophelia Speaks, which was published when she was a freshman at Wesleyan University. This early experience inspired Sara’s lifelong interest in how a blue-sky idea becomes a bestseller. 

Prior to agenting, Sara served as Editor-in-Chief of Alloy Entertainment, where she developed and edited bestselling novels, book club selections, and award-winning fiction from initial concept through publication, including two National Book Award finalists, a Printz Honor, the William C. Morris Award and the Coretta Scott King/John Steptoe Award for New Talent. Many of the novels she championed have been adapted to TV and film.

Sara lives in Brooklyn, New York, with her husband, three great kids, and one naughty dog, and spends summers on Fire Island. Please find more information about working together at The Book Group here.

Photo credit: Melanie Dunea