Published by Grove Press on September 30, 2025
Age/Genres: Adult, Fiction
Rating:
Goodreads
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 brings 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.
During her senior year, "Jordan" befriends Sam and Yash who become important characters in her story.
I have a love/hate relationship with literary fiction, and this time, it was love. I was so engrossed in this story and was quickly absorbed into this world. It's hard to express my feelings for this book, but I can assure you that I FELT SO MUCH. The last section had me in tears, but the college years stoked many of my emotions as well. The relationship between Yash, Sam, and Jordan is referred to as a love triangle, but I never really saw it that way. It was complicated, for many reasons, but it was clear who owned Jordan's heart.
We meet these characters when they are about 22 years old, and they are in their late 40s in the final part of the book. The way they changed and grew was obvious, and I appreciated getting to see how far they had come. This story hurt at times, but I really enjoyed the exploration of themes of forgiveness, friendship, and love.
Published by Grove Press on January 1, 2020
Age/Genres: Adult, Fiction
Rating:
Goodreads
Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfil her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink.
Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.
There are no lies told by this title, this book was about writers and lovers. Casey was a 31-year-old who had been working on her first novel for six years. The life of a writer was not shown as easy one, but I admired Casey for not giving up when so many of her peers had. She was dealing with debt and grief while people in her life kept disappointing her, yet, she endured.
King's writing style was a bit jarring for me when I first started reading Heart the Lover, but it grew on me, and it was very effective for conveying the level of emotions Casey was feeling. I can say it was especially effective here while Casey was dealing with A LOT and still attempting to keep reaching for her dream. I appreciated her grit and dedication because the deck really seemed to be stacked against her. I even feel like she learned from mistakes and started making choices for herself instead of having them made for her. I loved seeing her in her element and also thought her observations of people, things, and events were quite keen, and I commend King for being able to lighten the plot a bit as it could have gone deep into depressive territory.
I feel this story would definitely speak to creative types, but it could also appeal to anyone who has experienced setbacks and needed to someone who kept grinding succeed.
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