Macy works hard as a paediatrics doctor and is engaged to father-of-one Sean. Then she encounters a blast from her past at a coffeeshop. Elliot was the boy who lived next door to her childhood holiday home, when she was trying to adjust to the loss of her mother. They bonded over books and soon became everything to one other. But then something happened in their late teens which severed their relationship.
Alternating between past and present, the story is a little slow in parts but you can’t help but get caught up in Macy and Elliot’s world and wonder why on earth they have spent the past decade or so apart.
Love and Other Words, by Christina Lauren, is a love story told in alternating timelines. The summary says: "The story of the heart can never be unwritten.
Macy Sorensen is settling into an ambitious if emotionally tepid routine: work hard as a new pediatrics resident, plan her wedding to an older, financially secure man, keep her head down and heart tucked away.
But when she runs into Elliot Petropoulos - 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 bookish 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 in a house outside of San Francisco devouring books, sharing favourite words, 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." Love and Other Words is out in April 2018.