2022 AudioFile Earphone Awards
Bookseller Pick
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Writers & Lovers
A Novel
Bookseller recommendation
“Casey is the brilliant and vulnerable protagonist in this well-written novel. She is a writer and is striving to have her novel published. When not writing, Casey is waiting tables in Cambridge. She finds herself torn between two lovers. One prospect is a famous writer who is a widower with two children. The other is Silas, who is a teacher and the less stable of the two suitors. He shows up whenever he feels like it. Through the book, Casey suffers a health scare which enables her to focus on what she really wants and needs in her life. The writing is spectacular. As I listened to this book, I wanted to take notes of the extraordinary language. The narrator was up to the task and did an exemplary job.”
Melinda,
Buttonwood Books and Toys
Bookseller recommendation
“Casey is the writer of our time: in debt, trying to hang on to something like a writers' community, envious of others' successes, trying to choose where to live and how to make money and whom to love, while everything 'certain' around her changes: her restaurant job turns ugly, her apartment lease won't be renewed, her boyfriend isn't the person she thought he was. What's different about Casey's story? The honesty. The unpretentious intelligence. The (actually believable) happy ending, but more importantly, the moments when Casey describes the view from a car window, or a stop on her bike ride, or an awkward moment with a child or a dog, when you know you are sharing with her a moment of perfect clarity that both of you want to capture in words. Perfect for grown-up fans of Anne of Green Gables, or who wanted Sybylla to make it in My Brilliant Career, this novel can also hold its own among Women's Prize winners. With all the raw truth of a first novel and the invisible, but skilled, structure and language of an accomplished author, Writers and Lovers does something that feels impossible in the 2020s: It makes us believe, unironically and lovingly, in hope again.”
Nialle,
The Haunted Bookshop
Bookseller recommendation
“I have had this book since last fall, but have been *saving* it for the right time and I am so thrilled I waited. Quarantine is the perfect time to allow Lily King to bring you gently into the world she creates in Writers & Lovers. A young woman who has recently lost her mother is waiting for the world to make itself known to her. Stuck in a dead end job while trying to finish her novel and find love, KC makes the reader not just feel FOR her, but feel WITH her. A beautifully written story that shows Lily King is at the top of her game.”
Mary,
Anderson's Bookshop
Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with 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 has 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.
Lily King is the award-winning 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,” finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and winner of the Kirkus Prize. She lives in Maine.
Stacey Glemboski is a seasoned voice artist and audiobook narrator of many books in the science fiction and young adult fiction genres.
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Reviews
"[A] charmingly written coming of age story.”
“Elegant, droll…The nimble, astute narration appeals. This meditation on the passing of youth is touching and ruefully funny.”
“Gorgeous!”
“A comic and compassionate novel.”
“Captures…the eccentricities of a writer’s life, spiking the narrative with wit, sumptuous imagery, and hilarious skewerings of literary elitism.”
“An unexpected delight in the multitudinous pleasures in Lily King’s new novel is narrator Stacey Glemboski’s beautiful soprano, which lifts into a breath-catching ballad at a key moment…Glemboski’s warm voice has great narrative appeal, and she populates the wealth of interesting characters with believable, imaginative voices. One wants to remain long in their company. Winner of the AudioFile Earphones Award.”
“A classic bildungsroman for struggling artists everywhere.”
“[A] smooth, deliberate chronicle of creation.”
“Follows a deeply relatable protagonist navigating a whole menu of crises surrounded by a cast of genuine, vivid characters.”
“A knowing look at the pursuit of a life in the arts, with a protagonist you’ll root for.”
“King has created a woman on the cusp of personal fulfillment and strong enough to stand on her own…King wants us to keep trying, through whatever means necessary, to beat the odds.”
“This wonderful, witty, heartfelt novel…is a funny novel about grief, and, worse, it’s dangerously romantic, bold enough and fearless enough to imagine the possibility of unbounded happiness.”
“A modern-day coming-of-age tale that challenges the creative quest narratives for women….absorbing storytelling.”
“A story of ambition—and what happens when the markers of adult achievement are slow to materialize.”
“Funny and romantic and hard to put down…It’s hard to imagine a reader who wouldn’t root for Casey.”
“A closely observed tale of finding oneself, and one’s voice, while working through grief.”
“This deep dive of a novel will stay with me forever.”
“Exuberant and affirming, it’s funny and immensely clever, emotionally rare and strong.”
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