Love and Other Words

Christina Lauren is the combined pen name of longtime writing partners/besties/soulmates and brain-twins Christina Hobbs and Lauren Billings, the New York Times, USA TODAY, and #1 international bestselling authors of the Beautiful and Wild Seasons series, Sublime, The House, and Autoboyography.

You can find them online at ChristinaLaurenBooks.com, Facebook.com/ChristinaLaurenBooks, or @ChristinaLauren on Twitter.

An uplifting and unforgettable read that will make you fall in love with life again . . .

'You can never go wrong with Christina Lauren!' Paige Toon

'A true joy from start to finish' Kristin Harmel

Macy is settling into an ambitious if emotionally tepid routine: work hard as a new paediatrics resident, plan her wedding to an older, financially secure man, keep her head down and heart tucked away.

But when she runs into Elliot - the first and only love of her life - the careful bubble she's constructed begins to dissolve. Once upon a time, Elliot was Macy's entire world - growing from her gangly teen friend into the man who coaxed her heart open again after the loss of her mother . . . only to break it on the very night he declared his love for her.

Told in alternating timelines between Then and Now, teenage Elliot and Macy grow from friends to much more - spending weekends and lazy summers together reading books and talking through their growing pains and triumphs. As adults, they have become strangers to one another until their chance reunion. Although their memories are obscured by the agony of what happened that night so many years ago, Elliot will come to understand the truth behind Macy's decade-long silence, and will have to overcome the past and himself to revive her faith in the possibility of an all-consuming love.

The heart-breaking and heart-warming read from No. 1 international bestselling author Christina Lauren, author of The Unhoneymooners and The Soulmate Equation.

Find out why readers LOVE Christina Lauren:

'Pure, irresistible magic from start to finish' Emily Henry

'Heartbreaking and hopeful' Amy Reichert

'Pure joy' Sally Thorne

'What a joyful, warm, touching book! This is the book to read if you want to smile so hard your face hurts' Jasmine Guillory

'(A) tender story of first love, mature love, and the people who change us in the best possible ways' Washington Independent Review of Books

'A coming-of-age tale exquisitely blended with second-chance love' RT Book Reviews

'This is the angsty, emotional book from Christina Lauren that will break your heart into a million pieces' Goodreads

'This book will reel you in with the beauty of first love' Goodreads

The heart may hide, but it never forgets.

THEN

At thirteen you were my first real friend. At fifteen you were my first love, at eighteen you were my everything. We were about to take on the world together, until one mistake shattered our future.

NOW

I'm about to marry a safe man who will never touch my heart, whose loss would never break me. He doesn't really need me, and that's how I like it. Until one day I turned around in a coffee shop and there you were. It's been eleven years and nothing has changed. I don't know how to forgive you and worse, I don't know if I can resist you.

Loving you nearly destroyed me, but losing you again is unthinkable. Am I brave enough to risk it all?

'Christina Lauren's books have a place of honour on my bookshelf.' Sarah J. Maas, bestselling author of Throne of Glass

'Heartbreaking and hopeful' Amy E. Reichert

Told in alternating timelines between Then and Now, the first women's fiction novel from New York Times bestselling author Christina Lauren is an unforgettable, endlessly uplifting story of love and loss.

From the international bestselling author of The Unhoneymooners comes an unmissable story of love and hope.With frank language and patient plotting, this gangly teen crush grows into a confident adult love affairLauren writes of the bittersweet pangs of love and loss with piercing clarity, and delivers a resoundingly life-affirming tale of what it takes to claw one's way to necessary healing, both romantically and personallyChristina Lauren has found a new sweet spot, with heartbreaking and hopeful language that will evoke the whirlwind immediacy of adolescence and the complicated choices of adulthood. Love and Other Words weaves past and present together in an emotional story that will have you declaring your favourite word is LOVELove and Other Words is a triumph, the kind of book that makes you feel so deeply for the finely drawn characters that you almost forget they're fictional. You'll be swept away by the heartbreak, the joy, the chemistry, and the charisma woven through the fabric of Macy's and Elliot's star-crossed relationship. As the story unfolds - expertly interweaving the past with the present - you'll laugh, you'll cry, and you'll root for Macy and Elliot to find their way back to each other against all odds. A true joy from start to finishA gorgeous book . . the perfect mix of angsty and romantic, with a little bit of sexy thrown in, too. It pummeled my emotions and left me an utter disaster, but I was happy and content when it was all said and done. While not a traditional romance, it certainly was a beautiful love storyThis story is the perfect blend of white-hot young love and women's fiction, with an ending that will satisfy readers who love bothFilled with high jinks, pop-culture references, and grin-inducing flirtation, it's truly a romance for the 21st century. A smart, sexy romance for readers who thrive on girl powerLauren channels the elements of beloved romantic comedies... the dual perspectives of Evie and Carter will have readers ripping through the book to find out if these two can work things outThe stellar writing team behind Christina Lauren is back in top form in this light, funny and unflinchingly honest stand-alone novel about growing up, standing up and falling in loveWill we ever stop falling in love with Christina Lauren's fictional men? The answer to this is HECK NOI am so completely and utterly in love with this book. It captured my heart and it did not let it go. Simply beautifulA major success. It's now obvious that anything Christina Lauren writes is worth checking out, even if it's out of a reader's comfort zone. I've rarely ventured into the genre and wasn't sure how different it may be from Christina Lauren's contemporary romance novels. However, I worried for nothing because I was quickly hooked by Love and Other Words... and would happily recommend it to any Christina Lauren fan or readers looking for a sophisticated story of love and lossLove and Other Words is a beautifully crafted story of friendship and first love, of suffering loss and finding your soulmate. I felt every moment in this bookChristina Lauren takes a unique look at the evolution of infatuation