Writers and Lovers

Author(s): Lily King

Fiction | Recommended Fiction

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A New York Times Book Review's Group Text Selection


Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with another instant New York Times bestseller: an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.

Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink.

Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

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Thirroul recommends...


"I sometimes forget how much I love earnest, joyful books. Books in which emotions are unrestrained and female protagonists openly yearn for and strive after the things they want. Books which are often deemed unserious, unworthy of literary acclaim; books which are often penned by women and which intimately detail the complexity of women’s lives. Maybe it’s not that I forget how much I love these books but rather each time I read one I am startled anew, because each one of these novels opens up something raw and young and energetic inside me that seems impossible to sustain.


Writers & Lovers is one such book. Casey is a 31-year-old waitress and aspiring novelist in New England in the late ‘90s. Her mother died suddenly a few months prior, and a consequent messy relationship with a married poet devastated her further. She manages to keep her shit together during her double shifts at a fancy Cambridge restaurant and openly weeps on her long bike rides home. She hardly sleeps. She gets up early to walk her landlord’s dog for cheaper rent and to dedicate a few hours to her novel. She meets two very different men (both writers, though, of course) and goes on dates. She is crippled by grief and debt, often overcome with anxiety and depression, but so determined to write and to be a writer that she forges ahead. 


It is a grim situation. And yet Casey holds so much hope—the kind of hope that is jagged and too blinding to look at directly—and has such an unabashed sense of humour that her story, despite its dark depths, is a total pleasure to read. 


'It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone,' Casey muses. Writers & Lovers is a book you want to hug tightly to your chest until you see a friend you know will adore it, or who needs the lift it will provide, at which point you happily thrust it into their arms. Read it. Revel in it. Share it with your loved ones and revel in it together."


— Reviewed by our bookseller Kate


Product Information

General Fields

  • : 9780802148537
  • : Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated
  • : Grove Press
  • : March 2020
  • : ---length:- '8.25'width:- '5.5'units:- Inches
  • : books

Special Fields

  • : Lily King
  • : Hardback
  • : English
  • : 320