Heart the Lover
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2026, The Instant New York Times Bestseller
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4.3 • 195 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2026
AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'Touching, thoughtful, a deeply affecting love story about time and regret' DAVID NICHOLLS
'Steeped in yearning, melancholy and the reckoning with mortality that must come to us all . . . King’s writing still pierces you’ The Times
'Exploring how first love shapes a lifetime, here is a novel of piercing clarity' Independent
'Beautifully written . . . I was hooked from the first page' Daily Mail
Our narrator understands good love stories – their secrets, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules.
She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined – with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love.
Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
King revisits the themes of her 2020 novel Writers & Lovers with this alluring if uneven story of fading youth and writerly ambition shaped by a love triangle. The narrator, a successful novelist, looks back on her college years in the 1980s, when she's nicknamed Jordan—after the mercurial character from The Great Gatsby—by two intellectual boys in her literature class. She begins dating one of them, Sam, a devout Baptist who refuses to have sex before marriage, but soon falls hard for his best friend, Yash, an aspiring writer. Both boys poke fun at the mediocrity of the creative writing workshops she enrolls in, but her writing improves thanks to Sam and Yash's extracurricular company and their willingness to take her seriously. After Sam graduates and leaves campus, the narrator strikes up a secretive affair with Yash, which ends heartbreakingly at the closing of the novel's perfect first half. The rest is a mix of shimmering insights and clunky melodrama as the narrator, now married with two children, tries to hold onto her youthful sense of hope in the face of devastating news. As ever, she turns to literature, which she prizes for how it "alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life." Though this doesn't quite have the staying power of King's best work, it's still hard to resist.
Customer Reviews
Ooooft. Heart-shakingly good.
Pulls together love + nostalgia + time + consequences. Terrific.
All the feels.
I couldn’t put it down. It reminded me of parts of me I had forgotten.
Down Memory Lane
It takes a while for this book to move beyond direct experience and exposure to cement a meaning behind it.
The sharp degree it takes to this point was a welcome break between the interplay of characters from the start.
Their relationship and conversations strike a truly human and nostalgic tone and is done so in an innocuous beauty.
I left feeling more, but it took a while to arrive there. Worth a quick read and a nostalgic thought.