Love and Other Words

Love and Other Words, published in 2018, follows Macy Sorensen, a new paediatrics resident with an ambitious and emotionally guarded routine. She is working hard, planning her wedding to an older and financially secure man, and keeping her heart well out of the way. Then Elliot Petropoulos walks back into her life (the first person she ever loved, and the only one), and the careful arrangement she has built for herself begins to come apart.

The novel moves between the present and the years when Macy and Elliot were teenagers, when they spent weekends and summers reading together in a house outside San Francisco and he grew from a gangly, bookish friend into the person she trusted most. The two timelines fill in what happened between them, including the night he told her how he felt and the consequences of it, and why neither of them has entirely let go of the other.

Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings. The pair met in 2009 while writing fan fiction online, began co-authoring in 2010 and were represented by the agent Holly Root from 2011, and their books span romance, contemporary fiction and teenage fiction.