Leighton Schreyer

Leighton Schreyer is a queer, neurodiverse, critically mad writer, originally from Kitchener, Ontario, currently residing in Oxford, UK as a postgraduate (DPhil) student and Rhodes Scholar at the University of Oxford. This novel was inspired by their passion for science and their own experiences as a queer youth navigating questions of identity, belonging, and being. While this is their first work of fiction, their creative nonfiction has appeared in some of the world's leading medical journals, including The New England Journal of Medicine, JAMA, and the Canadian Medical Association Journal, and their poetry has also been widely published.

LIKE ELECTRONS (Fiction, Historical)

In 1912 Copenhagen, Denmark, Margrethe marries Niels Bohr, a brilliant and eccentric physicist whose ideas reshape our understanding of the atom. As his lifelong collaborator, Margrethe gradually sacrifices her own ambitions to support Niels’ genius—her contributions quietly fading into the margins of history. Across the Atlantic, and more than a century later, Quinn, a seventeen-year-old nonbinary teenager in Toronto, Canada, comes out to their physicist mother, Crystal, who can calculate quantum probabilities but cannot fathom her child’s gender identity.

Told in alternating perspectives, readers come to parallel Quinn’s struggle to help their mother understand their gender with Margrethe’s fight to help the world understand Niels’ genius. Time and again, Margrethe, Quinn, and Crystal must each confront the unseen forces—love, grief, identity—that bind and isolate them across time.

Rights Available: All
Agent: Zeynep Sen