Grove Press
Heart the Lover
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"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.
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Book Details
ISBN:
9780802165176
EAN:
9780802165176
Binding:
Hardcover
Pages:
256
Authors:
Lily King
Publisher:
Grove Press
In Heart the Lover, Lily King explores a plausible truth about unspoken love and its durable inconvenience.In the back of a public bus, Dustin Hoffman laughs with Katherine Ross, still wearing a bridal gown, after abandoning her groom at the altar to answer the Hoffman character’s extreme and dramatic declaration of love. Director Mike Nichols, who won an academy award for directing The Graduate, never called, “Cut,” in the last scene and, when they stopped laughing in the scripted moment, the actors remained in unscripted character, and eventually their sober reflections began to show in their unsmiling expression. Nichols captured a sense of what giant unknowns faced them going forward. It was a brilliant, unforeseen end to a film about how life is unpredictable and one generation can’t persuasively inform the attitudes of another. Heart the Lover confronts head-on the tentative nature of love’s connection to life, and how truth about feelings can (or in the author’s telling, will) be disclosed.Lily King has become, a voice of her generation. As a female novelist in 2025, she writes character in a way that suits her signature premise: female intimacy. A male author might describe his characters through physical characteristics and dress, where Lily King uses emotions and intellect almost exclusively. To resolve the situation, she creates for her character (and her readers) an emotional path to coping and survival in ways that a male writer likely would not. For example, King writes: “I can hear how tired he is. I have an impulse to launch a real argument, or tirade, about men and their ignorance of women’s life experiences and how we cope with so much they cannot understand, but they always make us feel in some sort of debt.” One hears her complaint but feels a female murmur. Harsh edges are present but softened in that character’s insight.There are many literary allusions, but they are inserted to show the intellectual vectors of students learning literature. They are placed in the narrative pointedly and without pretension. bright as they might be, adds verisimilitude to what her characters know and don’t know“Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity…Heart the Lover is a deeply moving love story that celebrates literature, forgiveness, and the transformative bonds that shape our lives.” These are true statements. Here King explores the toxic nature of fear and secrecy, for so long the burden assumed by women in tentative intimate relationships. Men, spared truth, stayed clueless.In six books now, Lily King has defined her literary turf. It is the same ground that early female existential novelists have explored, but more evolved. King brings nuanced understanding and personal responsibility to intimacy. If the heart has been for too long a lonely hunter in fiction written by women, Lily King explains how more enlightened understanding in a relationship can bring truth, conscious awareness, and emotional depth to experience.--Tom Casey
A beautifully written story about the facets of love - its simplicities and its complexities - and how a true love will echo within you no matter how distant. Many books can make me sad but few have made me cry. I wish I could read it for the first time over and over.
Heartbreaking and beautiful. Gut wrenching and raw. A college love built across time, multiple continents, families and relationship thought once broken and shattered. This book is nostalgic and yet modern, and shows that love indeed transcends distance and even death.
Very beautiful, I was immediately captivated by it
I'm sorry I downloaded the entire novel. I'm a quarter of the way though, and find the writing so meh, so bland, that I have trouble distinguishing the characters one from another. Maybe it's me. I just don't get it.
