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Writers & Lovers: A Novel
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Original price was: $17.00.$8.67Current price is: $8.67.
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#ReadWithJenna Book Club Pick as Featured on Today
Emma Roberts Belletrist Book Club Pick
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.
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Categories: Best Books of 2024 So Far
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Writers & Lovers: A Novel
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Original price was: $17.00.$8.67Current price is: $8.67.
ReadingOnTheBrink –
A friend recommended Writers and Lovers to me at the beginning of the year, and upon seeing it available from Libby, I gave it a go, and am SO VERY HAPPY I did. While it took me less than 24 hours to read this book cover to cover, I know I must own it so that I may go back and re-read and annotate this novel by Lily King. The simple, yet captivating story about a young woman trying to succeed in life, love and work, Writers and Lovers is contemplative and heart-felt. I easily found myself not only relating to the MC often, but rallying for her throughout the novel. I truly loved the flow of this novel, and look forward to reading more of King’s works.
Dar Roberts –
It’s a book about believing in yourself when you’ve lost that belief. When you’ve nothing left but your broken shell. And the powerful discovery that that is enough. That being true to yourself is enough.
A. –
I’ve read all of Lily King’s novels; each one has been better than the previous, with Euphoria a major triumph. So Writers & Lovers was a real disappointment for me, a slip back to her earlier work, which – while certainly not bad – isn’t particularly good either.
There’s something cold about Writers & Lovers, slight and insubstantial. The writing is occasionally quite good, with some amusingly sparky dialogue, but the novel never takes off, the characters a mere watercolor shadow of what they could be. At no point during the novel did I find myself caring what happened to Casey or indeed to any other characters apart from Harry and the two young boys, who were written with the charm that the others lacked.
I really wanted to love this book, and I really was excited when it finally came out – I’ve been waiting a long time for Lily King’s next book – so I admit my expectations were high. Unfortunately, they were ultimately disappointed.
Dinorah –
I was not a fan!
J. –
There’s a lot to like about this book. The book has some great highlightable one-liners about life in general, and the restaurant in the book feels like a very real place you’re hanging out in. The writing is enjoyable overall. If you just want to kind of experience someone else’s daily grind, it does take you on an interesting journey. If you’re not someone who needs a book’s plot to be realistic, you can just enjoy the maudlin vibe and contemplate all the ways your life is going better than the narrator’s (I hope).
But if you’re the sort of person who throws books across the room anytime a deus ex machina appears … just skip it, for your own sake. Almost anything good that happens to the protagonist feels painfully forced.
** Many, many spoilers ahead **
Maybe this is book a little bit too realistic, because the depressed/anxious narrator is SO depressed and anxious that she never manages to do anything likable. She just trudges through life in a slow-motion panic. If the book’s aim were simply to be an accurate portrayal of grief, this might still be worth reading about — hell, I loved The Road and it doesn’t get more miserable than The Road, right?
But no, against all odds, there’s romance mixed in. This woman sounds like she’s barely managing to stay upright, but somehow she manages to date not one, but two entire men, who somehow are really interested in her despite the fact that she is plainly decimated by grief to the point of not having a personality. What attracts these men? The exhaustion? The undereye circles? Because both are repeatedly described, by both the narrator and by other people who are startled by how bad the narrator is looking these days.
The source of attraction for anyone involved, including the narrator, is not clear. We only get to witness a few snippets of conversation throughout both relationships, and it’s all pretty dull with a few deviations into mild quirkiness. At one point, I was so startled by a man taking ahold of her arms and kissing her that I had to back up and read it again, because their entire brief conversation up until that point was so mundane that I thought I must have missed something. And it was their first conversation, it’s not as if there was some additional context to make it believable. But no, he’s just reaching for her in the park even though they barely know each other, and she’s cheerfully rolling with it instead of screaming, which is what I would be doing if someone came at me after five boring minutes of our first conversation.
Shortly afterward, this man tells her that she is the first woman he’s cared about in years, and somehow it’s not an epic red flag to this thirtysomething woman that a wealthy man is THIS interested in an exhausted sad waitress, all because they stood in a park and talked about trees for a few minutes.
Eventually, of course, the narrator must make a choice between the man who is wealthy but clearly awful, and the underwhelming man who doesn’t bother to communicate well or reassure her at times when anyone with half a brainwave would have been able to deduce that a little reassurance would be appropriate (such as when he doesn’t get in touch because he is sick for several days). She chooses the underwhelming one who doesn’t know how to use his words or his phone, and Mr. Radio Silence “forgives” her for not trusting him more despite the fact that he gave her zero reason to trust him in the first place. Yay?
If the biggest conflict of the novel feels forced (woman’s student loans have left her in dire financial straits because her discovery that her golf-coach dad was a misdemeanor-level perv somehow permanently ruined the entire sport of golf for her?? and also she just noped out to Spain for two years and defaulted on everything because it’s fun to make bad situations way worse?), the resolution is even more so: she basically suddenly gets everything she wanted, including a job at an amazing school because somehow, again, there are all kinds of people sprinkled throughout this book who cannot get enough of this woman even though she’s too busy stumbling bleakly through a grief-stricken existence to be confident, charming, or clever.
It’s at the point when this sad-sack protagonist asks for the exact amount of money she would need to solve all of her problems, and actually GETS THAT AMOUNT, that you start to wonder if you’re being trolled. But it’s too late now, because that’s the end of the book.
Lu –
Simple plot but filled with feelings!
Christina C –
Great book
Kindle Customer –
She grabbed my attention and pulled me into her world in the first few pages. The entire novel felt so intimate and true, that I felt Casey’s anxiety, joy, confusion, grief as if they were my own.
Susie | Novel Visits –
Let’s just get right to it. I loved Writers & Lovers! It’s my favorite book so far this year and I can say with confidence that Lily King’s novel will be making an appearance on my Best Books of 2020 list. Rather than sum up what this book is about, I’m going to share the many reasons why I liked it so very much.
King’s Storytelling – I’ve seen some call it uneven, but I didn’t see that. From start to finish I was captivated by Casey’s story and fully immersed in Lily King’s gorgeous writing.
Grief – In the story, Casey (already estranged from her father) has recently lost her mother and King’s exploration of her grief resonated throughout the story. She made me ache for Casey’s loss.
“I might still be capable of feeling happy. She will want to know that. But I can’t tell her. That’s the wall I always slam into on a good morning like this. My mother will be worrying about me, and I can’t tell her I’m okay.”
“During the day I miss the novel. I’ve lost access to a world where my mother is a little girl reading in a window or twirling in fast circles on the street, her braids raised high off her back. Outside of that novel she is dead. There seems no end to the procession of things that make my mother feel more dead.”
“I’m in the mood to call my mother, that happy shift in the wind mood. I calculate the time in Phoenix. Nearly noon. Perfect. The bolt retracts, and I remember she died.“
The Writing Process – I enjoyed getting to know a character that had been completely consumed by the creative process for years. To her own financial and personal detriment, Casey could not let go. I also appreciated how self-aware Casey was, constantly questioning herself and where her life was going, yet through it all, she kept at it.
Relationships – In the past, Casey has been involved with men who were never quite right for her. As Writer’s & Lovers unfolds she meets two very different men, both writers like herself, each adding a layer of confusion to her life.
“It’s a particular kind of pleasure, of intimacy, loving a book with someone.”
Cast of Characters – I thoroughly enjoyed the entire group of characters that moved in and out of Casey’s life and I especially enjoyed those at the restaurant where she worked.
The Ending – Casey’s crisis point and its resolution worked for me. I even got a little teary at the end.
From start to finish, I delighted living in Casey’s world, watching the evolution of a young writer on the brink of change. Obviously, I highly recommend Writers & Lovers.
Note: I received a copy of this book from Grove Press (via NetGalley) in exchange for my honest review.
Whitney –
I wish this went on longer and I yearn for a sequel. I saw myself within the protagonist/antagonist. Watching life pass me by and everyone in it. Dissociation, something that is very real and very hard to ignore. I was still able to find beauty amongst the sadness. I loved how the story just seamlessly flew from one scene to another. The way in which Casey was written, the mental illness, the traumas, coasting through life and somehow pushing thru it all and how the gaping hole in her heart was sewn up with the help of friends and lovers. I am Casey. My only dislike were the amount of characters and trying to keep track, aside from her lovers and her best friend, I hadn’t a clue who anyone named was. Just ppl from a restaurant. Otherwise I couldn’t find fault or anything to truly dislike to where I wouldn’t recommend. Even as someone coasting through life expecting for something to just magically happen despite not doing anything to spark that certain something