“To me, getting on a train is like, ‘Wow, this is just like in the movies!'” she exclaims. But she was raised in southern Louisiana, where underground public transit doesn’t exist. McQuiston knows that most New Yorkers probably don’t feel so warm and fuzzy about the subway. “I think that’s the closest thing you can get to feeling like you’re traveling through time.” “When you’re in a tunnel and going one way, and a train passes the other way, there’s this strobing effect where you look across and you can see 0.0005 seconds of 500 other people’s lives,” she says. McQuiston, who moved to New York from Colorado in 2020, was struck by the fantastical experience of being on a train underground. There are sweeping gestures, bountiful sexual tension and a steamy scene over the Manhattan Bridge that succeeds at making a subway ride romantic.
Like Red, White & Royal Blue, McQuiston’s latest revels in the delightfulness of its premise. But there’s a problem-Jane’s been stuck on the subway since the 1970s. Her name is Jane and she might just be the most beautiful girl August has ever seen. Then, on her commute to class, she spots a mysterious stranger on the Q train. Her second novel, One Last Stop, arriving June 1, follows 23-year-old August, a cynical college student who arrives in New York City with a blasé attitude and low expectations. “I always felt that if the book could find its people-other depressed queer millennials-it could do well. “I wrote a book that made my brain buzz and was fun and what I want to read,” McQuiston says. It’s now being adapted into a film by Amazon Studios. Instead, word of mouth spread on social media, landing the book on the New York Times best-seller list. Her 2019 debut novel, Red, White & Royal Blue, about the relationship between the Prince of Wales and America’s first son, was an instant and unexpected success: the book found an eager audience without any of the conventional launchpads, like a celebrity book club or splashy publicity campaign. Which is what McQuiston, 30, has set out to do with her fiction. “I know that sounds very corny,” McQuiston says, gazing at the Manhattan skyline from a picnic table across the East River.īut so what if it’s corny? Corny can be nice.
The author has always been drawn to romances that seem a little impossible-ones that show that the power of love can transcend anything, even time and space. Three words came to Casey McQuiston while she was taking a bath: magic subway lesbians.
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