Writers & Lovers: A Novel

Lily King

Mar 2020 · Grove Press

About this eBook

#ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today
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A New York Times Book Review’s Group Text Selection

"I loved this book not just from the first chapter or the first page but from the first paragraph... The voice is just so honest and riveting and insightful about creativity and life." —Curtis Sittenfeld

An extraordinary new novel of art, love, and ambition from Lily King, the New York Times bestselling author of Euphoria

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.

Ratings and reviews

I received a free electronic ARC of this excellent historical novel from Netgalley, Joseph Kertes, and Penguin Random House Canada. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this novel of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work. I am happy to recommend Joseph Kertes to friends and family. His prose flows, painting intriguing pictures of the past and the present, his protagonists are imperfect but compelling, and we see Hungary as it was, then and now. He is an author I have added to my must-read list. This is a book I would like to chew over for a bit and then read again. In the last couple of years, we are seeing more historical novels, both from WWI and WWII, that cover the facts of life, the joys, and hardships in the countries that fell to the German machine early in these wars. For many years we had France and Germany, and England and Russia, and little else. It is good to see this coverage of the everyday populace in those places hit first and hardest by these wars. That said, you are gonna love this story. Zoltan is a live wire, one you are glad you don't have to live with as did his Hannah, his children. He is so opinionated and so broken that I found myself frustrated with him over and over - until I realized that the things that really set me off he shared with my own father, damaged not by war but by life. Ah, the patience of my mother... And Zoltan's son Ben. I found it interesting that the one with the patience and understanding of Zoltan's way was his middle child. And I was so pleased that Ben was the one to see him through the 'surprise'. Set aside sacred reading time and pots of tea. This is one you cannot put down.

About the author

LILY KING is the author of the novels The Pleasing Hour, The English Teacher, Father of the Rain, and Euphoria, one of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of 2014 and winner of the Kirkus Prize. She lives in Maine.