About this item
Highlights
- "Lily King is one of our great literary treasures.
- About the Author: Lily King is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels, including Euphoria and Writers & Lovers, and the story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter.
- 256 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Literary
Description
Book Synopsis
"Lily King is one of our great literary treasures."--Madeline Miller
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 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, she 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.
Review Quotes
Praise for Writers & Lovers
"With wit and what reads like deep insider wisdom, Ms. King captures the chronic low-level panic of taking a leap into the artsy unknown and finding yourself adrift, without land or rescue in sight." --Maureen Corrigan, Wall Street Journal
"I loved this book not just from the first chapter or the first page but from the first paragraph . . . The voice is just so honest and riveting and insightful about creativity and life." --Curtis Sittenfeld, London Evening Standard
"[D]elightful . . . [A]n unmistakable broadside against fiction's love affair with macho strivers, even -- or especially -- when layers of lyricism and tenderness coat their machismo. The emotional force of Writers & Lovers is considerable." --New York Times Book Review
"Wonderful, witty, heartfelt . . . Writers & Lovers is a funny novel about grief, and, worse, it's dangerously romantic, bold enough and fearless enough to imagine the possibility of unbounded happiness." --Washington Post
"This smooth, deliberate chronicle of creation keeps the men in their place and Casey firmly rooted at the center of her own story. Instead of casting her as a woman torn between archetypes of male creativity, Writers & Lovers portrays her as a woman in thrall to her own generative processes, a devotee to the art of (her own) attention." --Los Angeles Times
"Among the elements that make Writers & Lovers so winning are the perfectly calibrated little details, convincing conversations, and droll wit . . . Writers & Lovers is a book about passion, desire, grief, determination, and finding one's way. It's also about craving love, family, and success . . . generously infused with heart and soul and wit and wisdom." --NPR
"King has created a woman on the cusp of personal fulfillment and strong enough to stand on her own, someone akin to Sally Rooney's Frances in Conversations with Friends . . . But King also situates Casey inside a variation of the which-lover-will-she-choose framework of, say, Nancy Meyers's film Something's Gotta Give . . . The novel is a meditation on trying itself: to stay alive, to love, to care. That point feels so fresh, so powerfully diametrically opposed to the readily available cynicism we've been feasting on . . . King wants us to keep trying, through whatever means necessary, to beat the odds." --Boston Globe
"This novel will become a defining classic for struggling young writers."--Vulture
"King captures the agita of an early-life crisis and the eccentricities of a writer's life, spiking the narrative with wit, sumptuous imagery and hilarious skewerings of literary elitism." --People
"Writers & Lovers made me happy. Even as the narrator grieves the loss of her mother and struggles to make art and keep a roof over her head, the novel is suffused with hopefulness and kindness. Lily King writes with a great generosity of spirit." --Ann Patchett, author of Tom Lake
"Lily King is one of our great literary treasures and Writers & Lovers is suffused with her brilliance. It is captivating, potent, incisive, and wise, a moving story of grief, and recovering from grief, and of a young woman finding her courage for life." --Madeline Miller, author of Circe
"Gorgeous!" --Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge
"If you loved The Friend but wish it had had more sex and waitressing, get ready for Lily King's Writers & Lovers. Delicious." --Emma Straub
Praise for Euphoria
"Taut, witty, fiercely intelligent . . . King is brilliant." --New York Times Book Review
"Intense, seductive, sexual, and intellectual . . . There are so many exhilarating elements to savor in Euphoria . . . Brava to Lily King." --San Francisco Chronicle
"Atmospheric and sensual . . . An intellectually stimulating tour de force." --NPR
Praise for Father of the Rain
"Surprising and wise . . . An absorbing, insightful story written in cool, polished prose right to the last conflicted line." --Washington Post
"King is a beautiful writer, with equally strong gifts for dialogue and internal monologue." --New York Times Book Review
"Haunting, incisive . . . King is brilliant." --Elle
"An excellent novel, sensitive and perceptive." --Chicago Tribune
About the Author
Lily King is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels, including Euphoria and Writers & Lovers, and the story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her work has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Maine Book Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Portland, Maine.