cover image Heart the Lover

Heart the Lover

Lily King. Grove, $28 (256p) ISBN 978-0-8021-6517-6

King revisits the themes of her 2020 novel Writers & Lovers with this irresistible if uneven story of fading youth and writerly ambition shaped by a love triangle. The narrator, a successful novelist, looks back on her college years in the 1980s, when she’s nicknamed Jordan—after the mercurial character from The Great Gatsby—by two intellectual boys in her literature class. She begins dating one of them, Sam, a devout Baptist who refuses to have sex before marriage, but soon falls hard for his best friend, Yash, an aspiring writer. Both boys poke fun at the mediocrity of the creative writing workshops she enrolls in, but her writing improves thanks to Sam and Yash’s extracurricular company and their willingness to take her seriously. After Sam graduates and leaves campus, the narrator strikes up a secretive affair with Yash, which ends heartbreakingly at the closing of the novel’s perfect first half. The rest is a mix of shimmering insights and clunky melodrama as the narrator, now married with two children, tries to hold onto her youthful sense of hope in the face of devastating news. As ever, she turns to literature, which she prizes for how it “alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life.” Though this doesn’t quite have the staying power of King’s best work, it’s still hard to resist. Agent: Julie Barer, Book Group. (Oct.)