👀 First impressions:
Lily King has been on my must-read list for years now, ever since Writers and Lovers absolutely floored me back in 2020. So when I heard that her latest, Heart the Lover, was being pitched as something of a companion piece to that book, both a prequel and a sequel of sorts, I was practically pre-ordering it before the cover art had finished loading. Published in October 2025 by Grove Press in the US and Canongate over here, the novel has been showered with end of year list nods from pretty much every major outlet you can name.
The setup is classic literary fiction territory. Jordan, a novelist now in middle age, looks back at her senior year of college in the late eighties, when she fell into a triangle of sorts with two best friends from her seventeenth century lit class, Sam and Yash. Years later, a crisis pulls the three of them back together. I went in expecting to be quietly devastated. What I actually got was something a bit more muted, and I’m still trying to work out exactly how I feel about it.
✅ What I Liked:
King’s prose remains a real pleasure. There’s a clean, observant precision to her sentences that I find genuinely admirable, the kind of writing where you occasionally pause just to appreciate the construction of a particular line. She has a gift for small details that open out into something larger, and a handful of paragraphs in this book are as good as anything she’s written.
The college section has real atmosphere. That late eighties liberal arts vibe, all radiators clanking in cold houses and earnest debates about poetry and cheap wine drunk too quickly, comes through vividly. King captures that specific kind of young adult intensity where everything feels enormous and consequential, and there’s a heady quality to those early chapters that I responded to.
Jordan is a likeable narrator, dry and self aware, and there are a few scenes between her and the boys that have a lovely texture. The literary banter, while occasionally a bit much, mostly feels earned because these characters genuinely are clever bookish kids who’d talk that way. And the central question the book is circling, about who we lose and what we carry forward, is a worthy one. When King hits the emotional notes, particularly in a couple of scenes toward the end, she really does hit them.
❎ What I didn’t Like:
Here’s where I have to be honest. For a book about a passionate love triangle, I just never quite felt the heat. I wanted to be wrecked. I wanted to feel that ache of impossible longing the cover copy promised. Instead, I felt like I was being told about a great love rather than living inside one. The chemistry between Jordan and the boys is sketched more than embodied, and that emotional distance kept me at arm’s length for most of the novel.
Sam and Yash never fully cohered for me as distinct people. I could tell them apart on the page, obviously, but they sometimes blurred into a single composite of clever, brooding young man, and I never felt like I understood what made each of them tick in the way the book seemed to assume I did. Given how much weight the story places on choosing between them, that’s a problem.
The present day timeline, which should have carried real emotional heft, felt under-developed to me. It’s noticeably shorter than the college section and it moves quickly, almost like King was more interested in the past than the present. By the time the crisis brings them all back together, I hadn’t spent enough time with these older versions of the characters to be properly invested in their reunion.
There’s also a preciousness to parts of this book that I struggled with. The literary references, the writerly self consciousness, the way certain emotional beats are framed in slightly elevated language, occasionally tipped over into something that felt more performative than genuine. Some readers will love this and call it lyrical. For me, it sometimes felt like it was holding the reader at a careful aesthetic remove from feelings that should have been messier.
And without spoiling anything specific, a couple of the bigger emotional moments resolve in ways that felt soft to me. King has a tendency to gesture toward devastation rather than commit to it fully, and I wanted her to push harder in places where she pulled back.
📚 Why You Should Read This Book:
Despite my reservations, there’s still a clear readership for this book, and if you’re in it you’ll likely enjoy yourself. Devoted Lily King fans, particularly those who loved Writers and Lovers, will appreciate the connective threads and the trademark prose style. The cameos and callbacks alone might be worth the price of admission for that crowd.
Readers who gravitate toward quiet, restrained literary fiction about memory, regret and roads not taken will find a lot to like. Fans of David Nicholls, particularly One Day, will find similar territory here. It would also suit readers of Elizabeth Strout or Curtis Sittenfeld who enjoy interior, character-led novels about ordinary lives.
If you’re looking for something searing or properly heart-shattering, though, I’d point you elsewhere. This is a more muted offering than the marketing suggests.
💭 Final Thoughts:
Heart the Lover is by no means a bad book. It’s well written, thoughtfully constructed and has moments of real beauty. But it didn’t move me the way I expected it to, and I think it’s because the novel keeps reaching for emotional depth while holding itself slightly apart from the very feelings it’s trying to evoke. The college section is the strongest stretch by some distance, and the contemporary storyline never quite catches up to it.
I had a perfectly pleasant time reading this, which is part of the problem. From a writer of King’s calibre, working with material this rich, pleasant feels like an underachievement. I wanted to be wrecked and I was, at best, gently stirred. Other readers are clearly having a much bigger response than I did, which is wonderful for them, but I have to be honest about my own experience.
I’ll still pick up whatever King writes next, because her sentences alone are worth showing up for, and I suspect Heart the Lover may grow in my memory the way some novels do. But for now, I’m filing this as a solid, decent read rather than a great one.
🛍️ Where to buy
To buy your own copy click HERE and HERE
Final Rating ★★★ – Beautifully written but oddly distant
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