Heart the Lover
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4.5 • 915 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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
“Lily King has written another masterpiece. This book overflows with her brilliance and her heart. We are so lucky.” —Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow
From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, 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 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. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she 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, the vulnerable days of Jordan's youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and must 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 love story that celebrates literature, forgiveness, and the transformative bonds that shape our lives. 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.
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.
Customer Reviews
My God
Loved it
Everything is difficult in this book.
That’s why it is so hard to put it down. I kept waiting for things to get easier. But they didn’t. A very different approach to a very familiar plot- disparate young friends navigating life. Loved it and will read more from Lily King.
Beautiful book
Wow. Not the typical book I read but I loved it so much. So beautifully written. So sad. Highly recommend