Love and Other Words - Christina Lauren

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. n A true joy from start to finish.

• Kristin Harmel, author of The Sweetness of Forgetting n