You knew I’d write a book about you someday.
Our narrator understands good love stories–their secrets and subtext, their highs and 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. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she 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, the vulnerable days of Jordan’s 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 must 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 love story that celebrates literature, forgiveness, and the transformative bonds that shape our lives. 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.
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. Her books have been translated into twenty-eight languages. She lives in Portland, Maine.
King will be in conversation with Bethanne Patrick, a writer, author, and book critic whose work appears regularly in the LA Times and has appeared in The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, at NPR Books and Lit Hub, and many other publications. Recently Programs Chair for the PEN/Faulkner Literary Foundation board, she has served on the boards of the National Book Critics Circle and the Smith College Libraries. Patrick teaches creative writing at American University and is a Virginia Center for the Creative Arts fellow. She hosts the award-winning “Missing Pages” podcast, about the book-publishing world. The author of two books for National Geographic and an anthology for Regan Arts, Patrick’s memoir, “Life B,” is out from from Counterpoint Press. She is at work on a novel about 20th-century Berlin. Patrick lives in Lewes, Delaware, with her spouse, their mini schnauzer Molly Bloom, and far too many books.