Lily King’s Heart the Lover is a masterful exploration of love, grief, and suffering

💡 Love stories are a dime a dozen, but stories that explore the intricacies, complexities, and dangers of love are few and far between. American author and celebrated literary figure Lily King is certainly no stranger to the latter, and her latest work, Heart the Lover, offers a brilliant dissection of what it means to love, lose, and — most importantly — be human.

The plot: Our narrator — a senior-year writer nicknamed Jordan — falls in with Sam and Yash, two classmates living in a professor’s mansion off-campus. Shared literary passion and evenings reading ancient poetry bind the three quickly, and Jordan and Sam soon become romantically entangled. But class divides and Sam's failure to truly see her strain the relationship as Jordan feels a mutual pull toward Yash. As one relationship ends and another begins, the trio’s bond is irrevocably damaged — and each faces a choice that means leaving someone behind. Then three decades pass.

What we loved: Written in the first person in a stream-of-consciousness style, the novel essentially functions as a memory vault — one that operates on a non-linear trajectory, oscillating between past and present; euphoria and despair. King’s prose is tight, intimate, beautiful yet grounded. There is no pretense, and the reader is presented with the narrator’s most intimate and unvarnished thoughts. The 250-page novel is also a love letter to the art of writing and literature — with a slew of poetry and literary references scattered throughout.

Heart the Lover may be about love — but it’s as far from a romance as can be. The author dexterously explores grief, mortality, loss, and nostalgia, making for a compact read that is impactful. Despite functioning as both a prequel and a sequel to King’s 2020 hit Writers & Lovers, Heart the Lover is written as a standalone that doesn’t require readers to have explored its predecessor — in fact, we only realized the connection embarrassingly too late.

The verdict: We teared up several times while reading Heart the Lover — do with that information what you will. Despite its relative brevity — we finished the book in just two sittings — it felt like a world unto itself, an entire lifetime boiled down in the most devastatingly beautiful way. While the first half of the novel may drag at times, the latter half is utterly gripping. If you’ve got a knack for literary fiction that incessantly tugs at one’s heartstrings, Heart the Lover needs to be on your to-be-read list.

WHERE TO GET IT- You can keep an eye out for a restock of the paperback edition at Diwan and Bookspot, get the eBook on Amazon, or listen to the audiobook on Storytel — which is how we enjoyed the novel.