Heart the Lover
A Novel
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4.5 • 88 Ratings
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Instant New York Times bestseller | Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction | Longlisted for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction | Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize | A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: TIME, New York Times, Washington Post, Boston Globe, Harper’s Baazar, NPR, Vogue, Oprah Daily, People, 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”
“Lily King is one of our great literary treasures.” —Madeline Miller
From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes an intimate and sweeping new novel of love and friendship—a journey into the heart of youth and middle age, desire and loss, and the intricate bonds that shape our lives
Our bright narrator is a college senior quietly dreaming of becoming a writer when she meets Sam and Yash, best friends and the golden boys of the English department. Top-of-the-class Honours students, they live at the stately home of a favourite professor on sabbatical and can banter about Joyce and Fitzgerald like a game of rapid-fire tennis. The two nickname her Jordan and invite her into their magnetic world where her college experience is forever altered. As graduation approaches, the lines between love and friendship blur, and Jordan finds herself caught in a life-changing triangle.
Decades later, her writing career is thriving, but motherhood is full of challenges. When she receives unexpected news that brings the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she thought she left behind. Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics have come to adore, King explores a tangled lattice of friendship, love, family and uncertainty that celebrates how we love, who we love and all the complexity a single heart can hold.
Author’s note: The fictional story “The Last Fall” is inspired by David Updike’s beautiful short story “Bachelor of Arts.” Many thanks to Michael Goldfinger for medical advice, and to everyone in my life for their love and kindness.
By Céline, translated by Ralph Manheim, from Journey to the End of the Night, copyright © 1934, 1952 by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Translation copyright © 1983 Ralph Manheim. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corp. and Alma Classics.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
A woman feels the long-lasting and painful impact of her college romances in this poignant work of literary fiction. The unnamed narrator—nicknamed Daisy and later Jordan, both references to The Great Gatsby—meets Sam and Yash in her 17th-century-literature class. After becoming fast friends, she ends up dating Sam but comes to realize she is in love with Yash. The novel deliciously focuses in on small details of Jordan’s senior year before hurtling through the next few decades, when tragedies unfurl and mistakes are made. Lily King’s cinematically gorgeous writing had us completely hooked. She’s a master at writing with tender insight and sharp wit about people and relationships, bringing us tangible and flawed characters we wanted to simultaneously yell at and give a big hug to. Fans of Sally Rooney’s intimate, character-driven novels will adore this musing on the choices we make when we’re young and their effects—good and bad—on the rest of our lives.
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.
