Synopsis

Writers & Lovers opens in the summer of 1997, as thirty-one-year-old Casey Peabody arrives in Massachusetts with very little to her name. Her mother has died suddenly. A recent love affair has left her hollowed out. Her mailbox holds wedding invitations from old friends and final notices from debt collectors in roughly equal measure. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square, rents a moldy room off a garage, and spends every spare hour working on the novel she has been writing for six years.

Casey's stubborn refusal to abandon her creative ambitions sets her apart from almost everyone around her — and makes her increasingly precarious. When she falls for two very different men simultaneously, the already fragile architecture of her life begins to buckle further. One represents stability and readymade family; the other, uncertainty and artistic kinship. The choice between them is also, in some ways, a choice about what kind of life she is willing to fight for.

Written with Lily King's signature blend of humor, emotional intelligence, and sharp observational precision, Writers & Lovers is a portrait of the last days of a long youth — the white-knuckle threshold between who you've been and who you're going to become.