Amy Lea came to publishing the long way round. A Chinese-Canadian government analyst based in Ottawa, she spent years as an avid romance reader before the online book community nudged her back towards writing. Growing up as an Asian girl in an all-white community during the 1990s and early 2000s, she rarely saw herself reflected in the books and films she loved. When she later discovered covers featuring protagonists who looked like her, something shifted. That recognition became the driving force behind the fiction she went on to write.
Her debut novel, Set on You, was published by Berkley Romance at Penguin Random House in May 2022. The book centres on Crystal Chen, a curvy fitness influencer whose carefully controlled gym routine is derailed by a smug firefighter who keeps stealing her favourite squat rack. Beneath the enemies-to-lovers banter, it's a story about body image, self-acceptance, and the particular cruelty of online comment sections. The novel was named one of the best romances of 2022 by multiple outlets and announced Lea as a confident new voice in the genre.
Her second book, Exes and O's (2023), followed Tara Chen, a romance-obsessed Bookstagrammer who, after a devastating break-up, systematically contacts all ten of her former boyfriends in search of a second-chance love story. The novel was named a Best Romance of 2023 by Entertainment Weekly and further cemented Lea's reputation for heroines who are unabashedly emotional and thoroughly self-aware. Both Set on You and Exes and O's are part of what readers know as the Influencer series, a loosely connected set of books built around a trio of Chinese-American social media figures.
Lea expanded her range with The Catch (2024), a grumpy-sunshine romance in which a fashion influencer's polished brand collides with a blunt lobster fisherman on the east coast of Canada. The shift in setting, away from the urban gym milieu of her earlier books, showed a willingness to stretch the world she'd built. Then came Woke Up Like This, her first foray into young adult fiction and the title selected for Mindy Kaling's Book Studio — a distinction that brought Lea's work to a significantly wider audience.
Her most recent adult novel, The Bodyguard Affair (2026), draws directly on her experience working for the Canadian government. The premise, in which a personal assistant to the Prime Minister's wife moonlights as a steamy romance novelist under a secret pen name, plays knowingly with questions of respectability and creative identity that Lea has spoken about candidly in her own life. Something Like Fate (2025), set during a summer in Italy, explores whether two best friends can trust love to be more than just chemistry and circumstance.
Across all her work, certain signatures hold steady: witty, fast-moving banter; heroines who are allowed to be messy and romantic at the same time; mid-2000s pop culture that lands as texture rather than nostalgia. Lea writes romantic comedy in the fullest sense, meaning the emotional stakes are taken seriously even when the dialogue is making you laugh. Representation runs through everything she writes, not as a stated agenda but as a natural consequence of creating protagonists who reflect the author's own experience of finally feeling like a main character.
Her books have been featured in USA Today, the Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, Cosmopolitan, and Elle, and she has been long-listed as a CBC Canada Reads finalist. Several titles have been optioned for film and sold to over a dozen foreign territories. She is represented by Kim Lionetti at BookEnds Literary Agency.
