I wrote The Pairing to be a bit of every decadent thing. I wanted it to overflow with flavors and pleasures and lush details, to make the reader feel like the two characters at its center, Theo and Kit. They’ve found each other again, four years after their breakup, accidentally booked on the same sumptuous, sensual three-week European food-and-wine tour. Hopefully, if I’ve done my job right, you’ll find yourself just as lost in it as they are.
This is a love story about things that taste better together. Food and drink, art and sex, gender and transformation, laughing and crying, pleasure and need, European travel and bisexuals, falling apart and coming back together. It’s about maximalism, about soul mates who needed time apart to grow into the perfect partners for each other. It’s quite a bit about being slutty abroad. And I had the time of my life drowning myself in cookbooks, art history lessons, and French poetry so I could write it.
–Casey McQuiston, Letter to Readers
What booksellers are saying about The Pairing
- I have no room in my brain for thoughts after turning the last page, only Kit-and-Theo and their tortured poetry and this: 1) Casey McQuiston you are a gift to this earth and 2) I desperately need to go on this exact European food and wine tour, if only to see this world through Kit and Theo’s eyes once more..
― Morgan Holub, E. Shaver, Bookseller in Savannah, Georgia | BUY
- UGH I both love and hate Casey McQuiston. How dare they make me feel SO much?! This book is everything. I am happily reading along the first half of the book from one of the character’s perspectives and then WHAM you’re hit directly in the gut when you switch perspectives. I adore this book — my favorite romance of the year!
― Jamie Southern, Bookmarks in Winston-Salem, North Carolina | BUY
- Casey has done it this time. While I don’t consider myself a romance reader, I do appreciate the genre. This book knocked it out the park for contemporary romances. This by far is the best McQuiston book to date. I can’t wait to put this book into readers’ hands. I just wanted to travel, eat good food, drink good wine, and fall in love while reading this book.
― Kala Saxon, M Judson, Booksellers in Greenville, South Carolina | BUY
- I never considered myself a romance reader until McQuiston came along, they are incredible at drawing Queer readers into the romance fold and brewing outlandish tales of desire and heartbreak. The Pairing is no exception– they tell a story of two estranged lovers that broke up on a plane on their way to a food and wine tour around Europe. Many years later, they both, coincidentally, don’t want their trip tickets to go to waste and run into each other for the first time again on the bus that will take them across Europe. Deeply silly, flirtatious, and as queer as they come, The Pairing is a book you won’t want to pass up this summer.
― Jackie Manginelli, Fountain Bookstore in Richmond, Virginia | BUY
About Casey McQuiston
Casey McQuiston is a #1 New York Times bestselling author of romantic comedies, including One Last Stop, I Kissed Shara Wheeler, and Red, White & Royal Blue, whose writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and Bon Appetit. Born and raised in southern Louisiana, Casey now lives in New York City with a poodle mix named Pepper.
