Heart the Lover
Heart the Lover
by Lily King
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About the Book
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
FINALIST FOR THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD
“Lily King has written another masterpiece. This book overflows with her brilliance and her heart. We are so lucky.”—Emma Straub
From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, loss, and the lasting impact of first love.
You knew I’d write a book about you someday.
Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.
In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off-campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.
Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.
Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving story that celebrates love, friendship, and the transformative nature of forgiveness. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.
About the Author
Lily King is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels—Heart the Lover, Writers & Lovers, Euphoria, Father of the Rain, The English Teacher, and The Pleasing Hour—as well as the story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her work has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award, the Maine Book Award, and a Whiting Award; has been a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, and the Story Prize; and has been longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize and the Women’s Prize for Fiction. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages. She lives in Portland, Maine.
Editorial Reviews
Instant New York Times Bestseller
Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize
Longlisted for the Women’s Prize in Fiction
Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME Magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Harper’s Baazar, NPR, Vogue, Oprah Daily, People Magazine, USA TODAY, Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Kirkus Review, BookPage, Apple, Spotify, Amazon, Barnes & Nobles, PEN America, Chicago Public Library
#1 Indie Next Pick
#1 Library Reads Pick
A Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance Read This Next Pick
Zadie Smith’s Elle.com Shelf Life pick for “the book that made me weep uncontrollably”
“Even I, who married my college sweetheart more than 40 happy years ago, read Lily King’s new novel about what might have been in a state of blubbery longing . . . Heart The Lover is nostalgia distilled
in black ink . . . King captures [her protagonist’s] guileless sense of
awe with just a dusting of parody that never grows silly or bitter . . .
And what’s particularly remarkable is how subtly King ages her
narrator, preserving the kernel of that young woman’s openhearted
urgency in the older woman’s complex voice . . . Only Lily King could
tell a story so steeped in sorrow and so filled with hope.” —Ron Charles, Washington Post
“King is a master of sexual tension, of the slow build, of gratification tortuously delayed. In this respect, Heart the Lover is her best work yet.” —Lauren Christensen, New York Times Book Review
“Might be her best book yet . . . It stands as one of the most
emotionally devastating and soulfully wise novels I have ever read . . . Like all of King’s fiction, Heart The Lover is literary without pretension, emotional without maudlin sentimentality . . . heartrending, swoonily romantic, rigorously clear-sighted.” —Priscilla Gilman, Boston Globe
“The latest masterpiece from the author of Writers and Lovers and Euphoria captures all the fevered obsession of 20-something romance—plus the deeper satisfaction of watching characters evolve beyond youthful hang-ups into fully realized adulthood.” —Oprah Daily
“Enveloping and sly . . . building heft in a manner as mysterious as affairs of the heart.” —Vogue
“Heart the Lover, like Writers & Lovers, feels at times as if it has been poured directly from the writer’s soul onto the page. Its opening words flag an elegy—to a lost love and to youth . . . What starts as a campus novel leaps over decades to offer a more expansive view of life that spans the emotional gamut from elation to grief. (Keep tissues handy.)” —Heller McAlpin, Wall Street Journal
“Witty, insightful . . . King is able to employ the best kind of humor: amusing comments that are funny not because of what is said but
because we can hear exactly how the characters are saying them.” —Chris Hewitt, The Star Tribune
“Intensely moving . . . The structure of Heart the Lover is so ingenious, its emotional charge so compelling . . . [A] great triangular love story . . . about screwing up, wising up, finding yourself and realizing what you may have lost in the process.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR
“An intimate novel about formative first love, friendship and the
relationships that never leave us. This time-hopping story (of the
perfect length, if you ask me!) sweeps you into the narrator’s point of
view with such visceral immediacy that it’s easy to lose yourself in her memories. I canceled my plans to finish this gorgeous book, and I felt welcomely emo for a few days afterward.” —Beck Harlan, NPR, “20 Books to Read With Your Book Club”
“King wholly captures the highs and the heartbreak of a passionate
college romance . . . One of many lovely aspects of King’s writing is
her ability to convey yearning as an integral component of character . . . Has many individual sentences that glow like small gems, as with a character’s sudden awareness of a landscape . . . Achingly poignant.” —Carol Iaciofano Aucoin, WBUR
“Achingly, gloriously sincere. You could say to a fault, except it’s clearly intentional. These are young people who want to fall into big feelings but also wonder if they can handle them at the same time.” —Chicago Tribune
“[T]his affecting novel…questions whether a person can inhabit any moment other than the present.” —New Yorker
“Suffused with the heady impermanence of first love, King’s sixth
novel is bittersweet, astutely observed, and thoroughly engaging.” —People
“To read Lily King is to love her.” —Harper’s Baazar, “The 10 Best Books of 2025”