Emma Leckey-Jamison Books

Emma Leckey-Jamison is at the very start of her story. A young writer from Newtownards, Northern Ireland, she published her debut novel The Place through Vanguard Press, an imprint of Cambridge-based Pegasus, in January 2026. It is her first book, she has said she hopes for many more, and everything about her profile, from the frequently changing hair color to the tattoos to the brood of tropical fish she keeps, suggests an author writing exactly the kind of chaotic supernatural fun she would want to read herself.

The Place is a university-set paranormal fantasy with a premise that stacks tropes with cheerful abandon. Cali Collins expects uni to be fun. Instead she gets a rivalry with a stuck-up classmate, a love triangle involving hot twins, a demon ex-boyfriend attempting to kidnap her, and a creeping suspicion that she may not actually be a faery at all. Meanwhile students are going missing from the university, and Cali's strange dreams suggest she is next. At 306 pages it is a quick read, and the tone is closer to supernatural soap than brooding gothic: chosen family, messy relationships, and a heroine stumbling through an identity crisis with demons on her tail.

For romantasy readers, the obvious hooks are the academy setting and the fae identity mystery. The love triangle and demon ex put it adjacent to paranormal romance, though heat-wise it sits low on our spice scale at a 1, so expect flirtation and drama rather than open-door scenes. Readers who cut their teeth on fae books like The Cruel Prince and want something lighter, more contemporary, and less polished will find that vibe here. Readers looking for intricate worldbuilding or high-stakes epic fantasy should adjust expectations; this is character drama first, with the supernatural elements serving the mess rather than the other way around.

An honest word about debuts from small presses, because it matters for setting expectations. Pegasus is a hybrid-model publisher, and books from this route do not get the editorial sanding or marketing muscle of a Big Five release. That shows up in visibility, in reviews being thin on the ground, and sometimes in prose that a bigger house would have polished further. None of that is a reason to skip a book. Some of the genre's most beloved authors started exactly this scrappily, and early readers get the real thing before anyone else has an opinion about it. It is simply worth knowing what stage of a career you are buying into.

What makes Leckey-Jamison worth watching is the voice her debut promises. University-set fae fiction with Northern Irish roots is not a crowded lane, and the willingness to throw a demon ex, a twin love triangle, and a missing-students mystery into one 306-page book shows an instinct for maximalist fun over cautious debut respectability. Whether she develops into a series writer or keeps producing standalones, the raw enthusiasm is the point right now.

There is also something refreshing about where this book comes from. Romantasy and paranormal fantasy skew heavily American in origin, and a debut written from Northern Ireland, set around university life rather than an invented academy for the magically gifted, has a different texture to its everyday details. The mundane parts of Cali's world, flatmates and lectures and rivalries, are drawn from a recognizable reality rather than assembled from genre spare parts, and that grounding is exactly what makes the supernatural intrusions land as intrusions.

Start with The Place, because it is the only place to start, and go in expecting a fast, tropey, slightly chaotic ride rather than a polished epic. If the university-supernatural blend works for you, our found family fantasy shelf collects more stories where the friend group matters as much as the magic. And keep an eye on this one. Every established author on this site was once a debut nobody had reviewed yet.