Casey McQuiston Books

Casey McQuiston went from unknown debut author to the face of modern queer romance in roughly one publishing season. Raised in Louisiana and trained in journalism, they wrote Red, White & Royal Blue partly as an act of political wish fulfillment, and when it landed in 2019 it did not so much get published as detonate. The premise is a perfect elevator pitch: Alex Claremont-Diaz, First Son of the United States, publicly feuds with Prince Henry of England until a wedding-cake disaster forces them into fake friendship, which curdles into secret, catastrophic, world-altering love. It became a bestseller, a BookTok perennial, and the book a whole cohort of readers points to as their gateway into romance.

The 2023 Prime Video film with Taylor Zakhar Perez and Nicholas Galitzine turned the phenomenon into an even bigger one, and a sequel film, Red, White & Royal Wedding, has been in development with McQuiston working on the screenplay. Few romance authors get one culture-shifting adaptation, and they are on track for two from the same book.

The follow-ups proved the debut was not a fluke. One Last Stop, from 2021, is the strange and lovely one: August, a cynical new arrival in Brooklyn, falls for Jane, a leather-jacketed punk on the Q train who turns out to be displaced in time from the 1970s. It is a love letter to queer history disguised as a subway meet-cute. I Kissed Shara Wheeler took a detour into YA in 2022 with a vanished prom queen and a scavenger hunt of clues. Then The Pairing, in 2024, sent bisexual exes Theo and Kit on the same European food and wine tour, betting on who could hook up with more strangers before inevitably crashing back into each other. McQuiston called it their spiciest book, and they were not exaggerating: it runs a 4 on our scale, while Red, White & Royal Blue sits around a 3.

What defines the writing is voice. The banter is fast and extremely online in the best way, the group chats read like real group chats, and underneath the jokes there is always a serious argument that queer joy deserves the full fairy-tale treatment. Fair criticism: the plots can be conveniently frictionless, politics included, and readers allergic to whimsy sometimes bounce off the charm. But charm at this voltage is rare, and nobody currently does it better.

On a romantasy shelf, McQuiston is the contemporary cousin with fairy-tale instincts. Princes, time travel, curses in all but name: the furniture is half fantasy already, and their next novel is reported to bring actual fantasy elements into a contemporary setting, which should surprise no one who has been paying attention.

McQuiston is also one of the most visible nonbinary authors in commercial fiction, and they have carried that visibility with a light touch, letting the books make the argument. Their real contribution to the current romance boom is tonal: alongside writers like Emily Henry, they proved that a romance novel could be laugh-out-loud funny, sincerely horny, and emotionally serious in the same chapter without the seams showing. The books have become default comfort rereads, the thing people return to during bad weeks, and comfort status is the most durable spot in any reader's library. Publishers spent the years after 2019 hunting for 'the next Red, White & Royal Blue' with such determination that the book effectively created its own subgenre of political fairy tales.

Where to start: Red, White & Royal Blue, still the purest hit of what they do. Take One Last Stop if you want yearning with a speculative twist, and The Pairing if you want the heat turned up and a tour of every bakery in Europe. Watch the movie after the book, and yes, in this house the book wins.