A beautiful and compelling story with elements of nostalgia and tragedy. I didn't think it was possible to care about characters so deeply within a 250 page book, but I felt like I knew them, their lives, their struggles.

I'd recommend going into this one blind and trusting the author!

Lily King's latest novel follows another writer from her college years, when she starts dating Sam and meets his friend group, including his best friend Yash. As she grows as a writer, graduates college and moves abroad, their triangle shifts and pulls their relationships to a breaking point. Sparingly but gorgeously written in the first and occasionally second person without being too interior or self-reflexive, this book is perfect for those who have enjoyed King's previous work or love a campus novel.

4.5 stars 🌟

Talk about a book that hits you right in the heart. In under 250 pages, King has crafted a beautiful story full of love, loss, grief and regret, with writing so poignant and tender it nearly aches.

Told in three sections that span over narrator's life, this story first follows a young woman called "Jordan" as she navigates college and coming of age, and her relationship with two men, Sam and Yash. In the next section we jump to her life as she is a little older, and reconnecting with one of her former loves in adulthood. The third and last section is the most emotional one, as she faces Sam and Yash at a critically important moment in their timelines.

This novel speaks to first loves and the choices we make when we are inexperienced and young and how they reverberate through our lives with lasting impact. Though I often lean towards plot-driven stories more than character driven ones, King just does it so well. I felt this book had similarities to the works of Dolly Alderton and the coming of age book Adelaide, both of which I loved. I can't wait to read more from King.

I don't want to give too much away, but this book has a link to Writers and Lovers. A must read for literary fiction lovers- now excuse me while I go pick up the pieces of my shattered heart.

A friend read this book months ago and encouraged our book club to request it and read it. This may very well be my favorite book of 2025! Outstanding. I love the story, the timelines, the characters and their relationships. I did not want this book to end. It will hold a very special place in my heart for a very long time. I have already recommended it to a few people!!

I don’t read romance but with all the buzz and love from my friends I gave this one a try.

First off I think this is more literary fiction than romance. I thought the writing was very good - I kept reading until I was done in two days.

The novel is written in the POV of the main female character. She is a college senior taking an advanced Literature class and soon meets two young men - she is impressed with their knowledge and experience.

Sam and Nash are friends and live off campus. They are “house sitting” for a professor so have lots of space for friends to hang out. Soon they invite our main character who they name “Jordan” and they quickly bond. Their friendship evolves into something much more along with all of the angst of young love.

I thought the writing and imagery were great and I felt I was there with them as they maneuvered through friendship, love, compassion, loss and acceptance of the lives they have chosen. This is very much an exploration of different phases of life and how early choices define us.

I read “Euphoria” in 2014 and didn’t really enjoy it. Interestingly, that was also about a love triangle. When I read the blurb for “Writers and Lovers” once again there is a love triangle. Hmm, maybe the author needs to move on to a different aspect of young love?

I received an ARC of this novel from the publisher through NetGalley. It was my pleasure to read and review this title.

Loved the pacing!!! Kept me engaged throughout and the characters — no one I loved but I stayed deeply invested. Perfect for sad girl fall!

HEART THE LOVER by Lily King follows the narrator as she goes through her senior year of college and meets two men, Yash and Sam, who change the trajectory of her life. I’m a sucker for a college novel and while this one started there, it expanded years into the future for all of them and showed the differing lives they all chose to live. The last quarter of this book nearly killed me. I couldn’t stop reading and the immense amount of regret, longing and ultimately, understanding between all the characters wrapped up the book in a complete, yet heartbreaking way. I found myself highlighting various sections of the book because the prose was so wonderful and had a way at cutting right to the feeling of being young and in love and the confusion that comes from growing up and not getting to say everything you wanted to, and somehow, life continues on.

I loved WRITERS & FRIENDS when I read it last year and *technically* this book exists in the same universe, you don’t need to read that one to understand it this one. However, you still should because it’s great on its own. Thank you Grove Atlantic and NetGalley for a digital ARC! Instagram post to come on pub day!

I really enjoyed the first 2/3 of this book. I liked the characters up until that point too. i couldn’t help but then get annoyed with Yash and Jordan towards the end. I wish it didn’t end the way it did, not so much the death part, but Jordan just forgetting her family because of her past/current love. It was extremely difficult to watch her complain about how Yash abandoned her while she was doing the same to Silas.

I loved the college years and the navigation of friendship and love. And even the years after, breakups and moving on. This would’ve been 4.5 stars for me but I just couldn’t get past the ending.

Do you ever read a review that makes you instantly order the book? That happened to me when I read a friend’s rave, eloquent take on this. Then I read 5% and almost gave up until another friend told me I must continue. I cracked it open again and read almost the entire book in one sitting! What was wrong the first time around? I think it was a case of right book, wrong time. I had just finished a book heavily set in college, so when this one opened up with a very literary college vibe I wasn’t immediately taken. Until I gave it another chance. Then I fell so madly in love with the characters I couldn’t put it down.

Heart the Lover is a book about first loves, about how the decisions we make in youth can affect the rest of our lives. It’s about the wild rollercoaster of life and how we manage to wade ourselves through. The last quarter of this book I was so invested in and felt SO stressed out by something happening I just couldn’t put the book down until I finished.

This was my first Lily King book and I absolutely loved her writing style. I ordered Writers and Lovers to read next as I heard there’s a tie in to this one.

Thank you @netgalley for the early arc of this book, it comes out September 30!

am a huge Lily King fan- Writers and Lovers is one of my favourite books and I treated myself to a reread this summer and was pleased that it was just as good, if not better, the second time through.

I went into Heart the Lover completely blind though, without having read the synopsis. I was unaware that there was a tie-in to one of her previous books, which was such a surprise. 🥰 The story moved in directions I wasn’t expecting, and I was completely enthralled. In fact, when I finished, I went right back to the beginning and reread several parts.

Lily King is one of those authors who can say so much with so little. Her writing often feels simple and deep all at once. In this one she captures the complexities of love and relationships, and also the pull in several directions at once so masterfully. And yes, I did cry at the end.

A favourite of the year. I will need to own a copy to add to this collection.

A one sit, audible sob, beautiful book.

You knew I’d write a book about you someday. This is how one of my new favorite books of the year, Heart the Lover, begins and I was hooked at line one. I’m so sorry to bring an October release to you now, but I LOVED this book and I want to tell you about it. It also has connections to Lily King’s Writers & Lovers if you want to read that in the meantime (it’s not necessary, and I didn’t love it as much, but I do LOVE Five Tuesdays in Winter by King).

Our narrator understands loves books and she loves love stories. She is a lit girl like us and loves a trope like hamartia, but her love story is much more complicated. She meets two guys in college and quickly becomes entangled in their lives. They call her Daisy, they call her Jordan, yes, nods to Gatsby, but I’m calling her our narrator as King is doing some interesting things with that. She’s gotta make a choice between the two, and does, and we meet her decades later when all her past decisions re-emerge in many ways.

I hadn’t seen reviews for this, so I didn’t know this was going to gut me. I didn’t know I was going to audibly sob on a plane and refuse to turn my phone off airplane mode until I finished every last, beautiful page. Before 2025 happened to me, I may have not found all the events of the ending believable, but now…I believe it and I FELT it. I recommend this to fans of Catherine Newman. This won’t be the last you hear from me on this one.

*4.5 rounded up*

If I had a dime for every time a contemporary novel was compared to Normal People…idk I already feel quite weighed down by this. Will readers of Rooney probably like this? I mean- I did, but this book is more everything I found beautiful about Tom Lake & Hello Beautiful. Really the only thing I find it has in common with Normal People is that the story follows two people who love each other that probably aren’t right for each other, and so they inevitably don’t end up with each other. But really, that’s a generalisation and the vibes are very different.

I didn’t find much that felt special about part 1, but part 2? Then 3?? Ugh.

I’ve already recommended this to 3 customers to keep an eye out for come pub date.

Also, I guess I have to go read Writers & Lovers now?

I liked but didn't love, I think this was a bit too literary for me? It was emotional, but also I wanted more depth? It was kind of.... quirky? It was a very fast read and I would definitely read another novel by her. 3.5ish stars

I have read two other Lily King novels and have loved them all. Heart the Lover is a beautifully written story about young love and desire, long term friendships, and the choices we make and their repercussions. The characters are flawed but believable and the story will tug at your heart.
A love triangle emerges among college students and the story unwinds over decades of their lives and the paths they have each taken. It’s a tender exploration of how choices made in our youth can have lasting impact. I enjoyed reading King’s lovely prose and recommend this book highly.
Thanks Net Galley and Grove Atlantic for an advance copy in exchange for my feedback.

Lily King’s new novel, Heart the Lover, is described by its publisher as about “desire, friendship, loss, and the lasting impact of first love,” and, yes, it certainly is all those things and will appeal to readers who enjoy a well-written, intelligent love story. But, in the able hands of Ms. King, the somewhat exhausted (and occasionally exhausting) young-person-coming-of-age genre is elevated, and, as in King’s previous novels, beneath the witty repartee and overt themes of love and loss, the author returns to her catalogue of far more subtle refrains that materialize as circling shadows beneath the smooth surface of the story.

The novel opens in a college classroom on a New England campus in the late 1980s. Our unnamed narrator is in her senior year, and her life takes a sharp turn the day that one of her essays is admiringly read aloud to the class by her 17th-century-lit professor, capturing the attention of the “two smart guys” of the class, intellectual hotshots Sam and Yash, who soon invite the narrator into their cosseted world—they are living, with another housemate, Ivan, a James Joyce scholar, in the cozy home of a professor on sabbatical—setting in motion a complicated love triangle with consequences that will resonate far into the future.

Although the author chooses not to reveal her narrator’s name until the end of the novel, it seems not to matter much, as her new friends call all of the girls that they date—and the only girls they know appear to be girls that they have dated or wish to date—"daisies,” after Daisy Buchanan of The Great Gatsby. But, when they hear that the narrator walked away from a college golf scholarship, they re-nickname her Jordan, and perhaps for them every woman is either a Daisy or a Jordan, just as a previous generation’s women were categorized as Bettys or Veronicas and a generation of women to follow would be Monicas, Rachels or Phoebes. In fact, this Jordan bears little resemblance to The Great Gatsby’s elegant, sporty, cool-as-a-cucumber Jordan Baker; she is actually far more aligned with Fitzgerald’s Jay Gatsby in that she is not from a privileged background like many of those around her—since losing her scholarship, she has relied on student loans, cheap housing (10 housemates, no heat), and restaurant jobs to get herself through college—and, like Gatsby, she is ambitious and willing to make crucial life adjustments to reinvent herself.

The college-era chapters involve an intense flurry of dating, miscommunication, rivalry, attraction, but also real connection and love, and, as the narrator notes in a later chapter: “what good is any other virtue without love?” Her time with these boys also, and perhaps most importantly, introduces into our narrator’s life a new model for embracing her own intellect. Conversations with this group are intoxicating because they are filled with clever wordplay, intellectual fascination, and excitement about books and ideas. Their perfect evening’s activity is having a meal together and playing an obscure card game called Sir Hincomb Funnibuster. As the narrator gets to know the boys, she realizes that up to this point she has been a “mere student,” and they are “scholars.” She decides that she has wasted years with “paltry dabbling,” and determines to “get serious.”

And here, King attempts to track the thrill of an expanding mind, an intellectual coming of age through a deep engagement with writing and literature. As the narrator will later remark, “A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particularly fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you read it.” And make no mistake, for the narrator this period also marks an awakening of ambition. She is quick to recognize academic strategies that are working for her friends. Despite the fact that she will have to take out new loans, she decides to put off graduation in order to take the coursework towards an honors degree. She makes the decision to prioritize her own intellectual gifts.

In any King novel, cultural expectations are always lurking just beneath the surface, and the sexual mores of the 1980s are certainly in play throughout the novel. The door into these smart boys’ lives depends upon the narrator’s romantic relationship with one or the other of them; there seems to be no such thing as intellectual friendships between men and women without sexual undercurrents. In addition, the narrator notes that her professors are all men, and she has never been invited into any of their homes for meals and conversation like her male friends have, and, despite her own consistently high grades, she has not been singled out by any of her professors, except the one that came into the restaurant where she worked and made a pass at her. Sexual violence is barely remarked upon. When an old roommate of the narrator’s is raped and then stabbed multiple times by an obsessed young man, the response to the incident feels muted and the murder is mentioned only one time in the campus newspaper.

In time, Jordan will become the breakout success of the group, which will come as no surprise to the reader. The final two sections of the novel revisit certain relationships many years later, and for this reader these sections are slightly less compelling. One reason is that a crucial plot point hinges on fairly simple miscommunication, but if anyone can wield that weathered trope with dignity, it’s Lily King. The later chapters also serve to remind the reader that the unexpected joys and sadnesses of life have very little to do with decisions of the past, but that early connections linger, and it is never too late to find resolution.

An edited version of this review will appear in the 24 September 2025 issue of BookBrowse.

Poetry in motion. These words sing with perfect pitch, and dance their way off the page into yearning hearts. This isn’t a tidy love story. It’s messy and non-linear. It captures heartbreak and lost love, but somehow still emanates hope. It explores all variations of love, platonic to romantic and everything in between.

Literature fiction can be hit or miss for me, but when it hits, it does so with sledgehammer force. This one obliterated my defenses and filled my scattered remnants with endearment.

Sometimes you read a book at the exact right moment in your life. I think Heart The Lover was one of those books for me. There was so much in it that I connected with, the confrontation of life and all its choices, and the outcome of those choices. It starts as a fun romance, kick-your-feet type stuff. I was giddy as Jordan met Sam, and beside myself when I realised Sam wasn’t the one at all. From there we follow Jordan, as she’s called throughout the book, in the midst of young love, finishing her university career, her life in Paris, and the devastation upon returning to America. The novel spans out to her later life, her family and kids, and the impact of decisions made by herself and others in her life that lead her in a different direction. It’s beautiful in its yearning, in showing us that the life we create can go in different ways than we think but still be a beautiful life. I loved every second of reading it, every tearful second.

This book brought me right out of a deep reading slump. King's book grabs you from the first sentence and takes you through decades of our narrator's life, starting during her senior year of college. King's tale of friendship, family, and love will rip your heart out. I loved every second of it.

This novel is told in 3 parts, starting in college where “Jordan” meets Sam and Yash and finds herself in a charged triangle, with the story spanning over 3 decades. Honestly I’m surprised at how much i enjoyed this book… it’s deep, thought provoking and emotional, and i could not put it down (finished in 24 hours). There’s romance, but it’s more about how the decisions you make in your youth really do affect the rest of your life. It felt so relatable to when i was in my 20s.

The writing style sort of reminded me of Tomorrow, Tomorrow, Tomorrow. It’s different in that it’s more detached, abrupt/matter of fact and i didn’t even realize how sucked into the story i was (the ending of part 1, tears were flowing).

Thank you NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the ARC in exchange for an honest review!

-“What I am saying, these decisions we make in youth are everything. You have no idea. Those feelings, they don’t revenir. Pas comme ça. And no one tells you.”
-“But where would we be if we didn’t feel it? I think it’s the only form of hope we have. For our survival, I mean. What good is any other virtue without love?’

I can’t say enough about Heart the Lover. The author’s writing captivates the reader while the story hooks you from the very beginning.

The narrator, affectionately nicknamed Jordan by her new friends Sam and Yash, enters a world of witty banter, academic zeal and late night card games during her Senior year of college. The friendship between the three develops along with Jordan’s own academic ambition as a romantic triangle complicates their lives for years to come.

The writing is unadorned and demonstrates clearly the complex relationships between the characters. The reader is immersed in the academic setting of a professor’s drafty, cluttered home. The perfect backdrop for academic debate and inspiration. Told with the author’s trademark style of wit and emotion, Heart the Lover is an exceptional coming of age story both gut wrenching and consoling.

Thanks to NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for the advanced reader’s copy.