Heart the Lover - Lily King
From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, loss, 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, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules.
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.
Written with the precision of poetry and the emotional tide of an epic, Heart the Lover is a celebration of literature and the life-long echoes of young love. 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.
"Lily King has written another masterpiece. This book overflows with her brilliance and her heart. We are so lucky."—Emma Straub, bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow
"Time moves like memory in Heart the Lover—urgent, intimate, elusive. What does it mean to carry a story you never get to finish? With breathtaking precision, Lily King writes about love that lingers and choices that haunt. I read it in a single, breathless sitting." —Ruth Ozeki, author of the Women's Prize for Fiction winner The Book of Form and Emptiness
"Indescribably good. It is incredible that Lily has managed to tell such an epic love story in just 250 pages, and I emerged feeling ruined for all other books. I adored these characters and feel lucky to have known them. I'm in awe. A perfect literary love story." —Florence Knapp, New York Times bestselling author of The Names
"Time moves like memory in Heart the Lover—urgent, intimate, elusive. What does it mean to carry a story you never get to finish? With breathtaking precision, Lily King writes about love that lingers and choices that haunt. I read it in a single, breathless sitting." —Ruth Ozeki, author of the Women's Prize for Fiction winner The Book of Form and Emptiness
"Indescribably good. It is incredible that Lily has managed to tell such an epic love story in just 250 pages, and I emerged feeling ruined for all other books. I adored these characters and feel lucky to have known them. I'm in awe. A perfect literary love story." —Florence Knapp, New York Times bestselling author of The Names
Paperback
