Before We Were Strangers
Renée Carlino's second-chance romance opens with a Craigslist Missed Connection, a man on a New York subway swearing he just locked eyes with the girl he loved fifteen years ago. The post finds Grace, and the novel rewinds to 1996 NYU, where she and Matt fell hard inside the kind of dorm-room relationship that feels inevitable until it shatters on a single misread silence. Carlino moves between the present-day reunion and the past they ruined, slowly revealing what really kept them apart, including a manipulation neither of them suspected at the time. Tender, music-saturated, and unembarrassed about its emotional swings, the book reads quickly and lands somewhere bittersweet, a romance for anyone who has ever lain awake wondering what would have happened if one phone call had been answered.
Themes & atmosphere
What you might want to know about Before We Were Strangers
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
A man posts a Missed Connections note about a girl he loved in college fifteen years ago. The novel cuts between their NYU romance in the nineties and the fragile present-day reunion the post sets in motion.
Before We Were Strangers contains some explicit romance scenes, around 3 out of 5 on the spice scale. The story alternates between past and present timelines following two former lovers.
Before We Were Strangers contains some explicit romance scenes, around 3 out of 5 on the spice scale. The story alternates between past and present timelines following two former lovers.
Before We Were Strangers is a standalone novel by Renee Carlino. Carlino has written other contemporary romances including Sweet Thing and Swear on This Life.
Before We Were Strangers was written by Renée Carlino, published in 2015 by Atria Paperback.
Before We Were Strangers is 310 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Before We Were Strangers takes most readers 5 to 7 hours to finish.
Before We Were Strangers is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.