The main character is first called Daisy, then referred to as Jordan, both references to The Great Gatsby, yet we never learn her actual name until the last sentence. While told from her point of view, this level of separation keeps you at a distance even though the events are happing directly to her, a literary feat I found impressive.

This novel explores first loves, complex relationships, and how those you meet in your youth can have a lasting impact on your life.

I didn’t cry but I came close. I found the story that emotionally raw. It also filled me with nostalgia for my University days.

Writing this with the tears drying on my face. Read in practically one sitting (had to break for sleep lol). The most beautiful kind of love story--brutal, but beautiful. I'll be rereading Writers & Lovers, because there's a connection, and Euphoria, because it was my first by King, and then I'll be moving on to Five Tuesdays in Winter, because I haven't yet read it. And then I'll be buying a hard copy of this one when it publishes. Give me all the Lily King!

@lilykingbooks is an auto-read for me. Her writing is pared-down and moving and unapologetic. Her characters become friends. King’s ability to create a heart-aching love from the ether is nothing short of sorcery. I read most of this book with my hand over my mouth, eyes wide. The end of part one was a wallop. This novel is beautiful and deeply moving. May we all have a love like Yash. May we all have a partner like Silas.

Girl goes to college. Girl meets boy. Girl dates boy. Girl isn’t inexplicably drawn to boy’s roommate. Girl and boy break up (thank god). Girl and roommate build a love that rivals anything this reader has seen (read) before. But life gets in the way. It also marches on.

Thank you to @netgalley for this advanced copy. Look for this book in October. And find a quiet day or two to spend time with these people. You won’t regret it.

received a free copy of this book from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Heart the Lover is a quick, heartwarming college novel. It traces the story of a woman and the three loves of her life through time. King writes with beautiful prose and captivates the reader. The ending is perfect. For fans of Kristin Hannah. I can’t wait to read writers and lovers now.

Do you ever read a book and know that it will stay with you for a very long time?
That is how I felt after finishing this book.

It is a coming-of-age, a dark academia, a story about family, a tragedy.

This is a beautifully written and relatable story about love, creativity, and the crucial choices made over the course of three decades in a woman’s beautifully rendered life.

I don’t want to give too much away because getting swept away in King’s prose and complicated, fully rendered characters is something that must be experienced, not described.

A boyfriend, the boyfriend’s best friend, the connection between them and the unwillingness and struggle to sacrifice their relationships and desires.

<b>‘Isn’t love a form of hope?’ I said.
‘No. Love is crushing. Love is something you let yourself feel at your own peril, despite your better sense.’
</b>
Lily King does not write in my usual genre, and yet I am always drawn fully into her books.
This is a book to be savoured, but also binged. A book that spans three decades of a woman’s life starting in 1957.

You don’t actually learn her name until the very end!

I did find the time jump discombobulating and I did lose some of that connection to our narrator in it. We missed so much of her life to make her what she had become and where she had come, compared to the prior intimate details about every aspect of her college life and the year after.

<b>The feeling catches me off guard.
Oh. Love.</b>

There is an alluring thread to Writers and Lovers!

Arc gifted by Grove Atlantic.

4.5⭐️ This is literally fiction at its best. I felt so many emotions and didn’t even hope for certain outcomes because I knew I could just trust in the author. I was not disappointed!

This was my first five star of the year. I will read everything that Lily King writes. She evokes so much emotion into the characters and into every page. This book was heartbreaking but beautiful. I can’t remember the last time a book made me cry so much.

Great writer but I really could not get into this story. Thanks for the opportunity to read but it was just not for me. Good Luck with the boo.

I don’t usually read romance, but Heart the Lover really worked for me. It’s set on a 90s college campus and the whole vibe felt familiar without being too nostalgic. The setting is sharp and detailed without trying too hard.

What stood out the most was how real the relationship felt. Yash and the main character have a connection that’s believable and grounded. Nothing overly dramatic, nothing cringey. Just two people figuring it out in a way that felt honest.

The writing is clean and thoughtful. Lily King has a way of capturing emotion without dragging it out. I was surprised by how much it got to me. Quietly emotional, not overly sentimental.

It’s the kind of book that stays with you for a while. Simple, well done, and unexpectedly moving.

Lily King is a gift! This was hugely anticipated by me and it delivered, One of my favourite writers of them all.

This was such a beautiful book about friendship, choices, love, enduring relationships and I will continue to think about it for a very long time.

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.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Lily King has written a beautiful story of friendship, love, and loss. I loved the opening line, "You knew I'd write a book about you someday." Drew me in immediately to find out who is "you."
There were so many great quotes in this book, but among my favorites is, "All literature rests on the promise that we change, we grow, we have epiphanies, become better, understand our flaws." That says it all about the first person narrator of Heart the Lover. We are along for a wonderful ride as watch her change, grow and understand her flaw. I feel like I knew the narrator intimately, but never knew her name, nor the subject of her award-winning novel. And I didn’t need to know because this book was so rich in characters, I only wanted to know their life stories. I didn’t want it to end.
Thank you, Grove Press for giving me the opportunity to review this book.

I was a huge fan of Writers & Lovers, but have struggled to connect with some of King's other works, but Heart the Lover completely broke my heart and put me back together again. I could not have loved this more. The characters are well-developed and so gosh darn real. The dialogue, too, is a huge strength of this story. I loved the structure of this book, the narration style. And the way that our narrator's name wasn't revealed until the end? Beautiful, genius, poignant, perfect. I am awestruck. This book is for fans of Writers & Lovers, readers of Ann Patchett, lovers of beautiful stories about all the different loves we experience in life. It was perfect. Thank you SO much for allowing me to receive and read this ARC--I think I found my top read of the year. I will be purchasing a physical copy upon its release.

i like the protagonist enough. the prose is terse and straightforward in a decent way and i feel it is thanks to the character herself. the way she's written feels engrossing to me, despite the near clinical prose. maybe it's because of the prose itself that she feels engrossing to me. whichever way we slice it, the fact of the matter remains: this is a decently written protagonist, which i already expected and was glad to find again from lily king.

as for the rest of the characters (that were memorable for me) sam is a character you'd pluck straight from the high horses of people you know irl. he do be one of those confident kids born with a silver spoon in their mouths, who, like the protagonist here describes, "grew up in a stable household so they create their own problems." the problem sam chose is shame and guilt stemming directly from his religion. it's so laugh-out-loud funny to read. that's the other thing: he's presented here with very little flair. the scenes he's in of course contains no laugh track, not even a tiny indication that the author herself is laughing, but his entire existence is so goddamn funny (pun intended).
yash, quiet and subtle and concentrating everywhere even in his sleep, is also a finely wrought character. he's very loveable and his journey in falling in love with our main protagonist is quite charming.

i'm not going to talk much about the other characters because it will reveal too much about the plot but all i'll say about it for now is i may be a bit discontented with how everything unfolded but that doesnt take away from the story's subtle charm. all in all this isn't necessarily my favorite lily king novel.

breaking my no spoiler rule in this review to say this, so skip if you prefer not to be spoiled, but related to what i said in the paragraph above:
<spoiler>the fact that this connects to Writers and Lovers (the only novel of Lily King's that I've read so far before this)</spoiler> endeared me to this story. i remember being so taken with <spoiler>Casey Kasem and the alliteration in her name,</spoiler> and everything else about her journey in that aforementioned novel.

thank you netgalley and grove press for an eARC in exchange for an honest review!

This might be my favorite book I’ve ever read. I’m about to start it back from the beginning right now. I’m pre-ordering it. I need to read everything Lily King has ever written. I want to read the books and articles she references in this book. I want my friends to read it.

“Always always.”

TY NetGalley, this one is unparalleled.

Absolutely beautiful. I was sobbing by the end and I tore through this novel in one day. I was feverishly turning pages as I read about Yash and “Jordan’s” love story in college, their estrangement and reunion decades later. This novel will move you. The story is so beautifully crafted. When King revealed the narrators real name on the last page of the novel, my jaw dropped. I will now be directly reading Writers and Lovers because I just can’t get enough of Lily King’s writing. I will be plowing through her backlist. Such a talented writer. Five star book for sure! I couldn’t love it more !

Lily King is a beautiful writer, and the prose in this book was lovely at many points. However, the story itself simply wasn't my cup of tea - it fell outside of my expectations given what I knew about the story. I think that many people will enjoy this book, however. It just wasn't my personal taste.

4.5/5 stars for me. I absolutely loved this book!

Wow. This book will have me thinking about it for a long time.

Heart the Lover starts with three friends who all met in college. This book follows the trio as the years go by and their lives become separate until something calls them back together. This book touches on themes of love, friendship, loss, and grief.

I absolutely devoured this book. This is definitely a book that you can read in one sitting, but be prepared to be emotionally wrecked by this book. Everything about this book was beautiful. I absolutely loved the way Lily King wrote these characters. They weren't exactly lovable, but you grew to understand them as they grew up. The way King writes about love and loss is so beautiful. I was so hooked on her writing. This book gave off Sally Rooney/ Normal People vibes in the best way possible.

I took a half star off because I found it somewhat hard to get into, and found it a bit confusing at times. However, I didn't want to put it down once I got into this book. This was my first time reading a Lily King book, and I definitely will be checking out her other books.

Thanks NetGalley and Grove Atlantic for this ARC! Everyone needs to go read this book.

5 star-Jordan meets Sam in a lit class in college and is introduced to his roommate Yash. So begins friendships and love between the three that spans many years. I fell in love with Jordan from the start,it was such an attachment that I wanted to give her advice and then would get upset that she didn’t follow it…this book was such a roller coaster of the lowest lows and the highest highs. It felt real and raw. The total cliche, I laughed, I cried, but I did. This will for sure be one of my top books of 2025. I haven’t read anything like it, but I will be out there looking for the author to again make me feel the way I did reading this book. Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for the ARC.