Sara Shandler

Senior agent

Sara Shandler joined The Book Group in 2025 after more than twenty years in publishing, most recently as the Editor-in-Chief of Alloy Entertainment, where she collaborated with authors from the inception of their stories through publication. Sara’s introduction to publishing began around the dinner table with her can-do-anything hippie parents who encouraged her to write the bestselling book Ophelia Speaks, which gave voice to the experience of teenage girls and was published when she was a freshman at Wesleyan University. This early experience inspired Sara’s lifelong interest in making a blue-sky idea into a best seller.

Sara has worked on many New York Times best sellers, Book Club selections, and award winning novels, including two National Book Award finalists, a Printz Honor, Walter Dean Myers Award Honors, the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize, the Carnegie Medal, the William C. Morris Award, the Stonewall Award for Teens, the Lambda Literary Award and the Coretta Scott King-Steptoe Award for New Talent. Many of the novels Sara developed and edited have been successfully adapted to TV and film. She lives in Brooklyn, New York with her husband, three children and dog, and spends summers in Fire Island.    

Sara is interested in upmarket commercial fiction (Book Club fiction, psychological suspense, family sagas, high concept romantic comedy), emotionally resonant YA, and narrative non-fiction, topical social psychology and parenting non-fiction and author-illustrators telling stories in unconventional ways. She is typically attracted to books with women’s lives at the center and an active plot, and enjoys stories that make her laugh, think, and see the world in surprising ways.

A few books I loved reading in my free time... Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe, Like Mother, Like Mother by Susan Rieger, The Guest by Emma Cline, Nobody Will Tell You This But Me by Bess Kalb, This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub, Untangled by Lisa Damour, Ph.D., None of This is True by Lisa Jewell, You Could Make This Place Beautiful by Maggie Smith. 

Sara Shandler’s client list includes:

Upasna Barath
Allie Call
Dr. Bronwen Carroll
Cathryn Free
Adele Griffin
Lucy Keating
Caroline Langerman
Galt Niederhoffer
Iva-Marie Palmer
Sarah Sutton
Cecily von Ziegesar