Heart the Lover

Heart the Lover by Lily King

Casey Peabody #2

Fiction

2025

Finished on May 17, 2026

Rating: 4/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

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, Jordan 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.

I've been looking forward to reading Heart the Lover from the moment I heard it was to be published. I loved Writers & Lovers, and was eager to read another novel by Lily King. (I thought I read Five Tuesdays in Winter, but find no record of it, so I guess it slipped by me!)

I liked Heart the Lover well enough, but two of the three main characters annoyed me so much that it made it difficult to really enjoy the story. It wasn't until I reached the halfway mark that I was finally hooked. Those chapters are King's strongest, and I couldn't stop reading until I finished the book. It was almost midnight, and my husband was sound asleep next to me. It was all I could do to not start sobbing, which I rarely do while reading. The ending just about gutted me!

I only marked one passage, but it's one that I think most readers can relate to:

'You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books? A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you're reading it. And it preserves it, like a time capsule.'

I understand that this is both a prequel and a sequel to Writers & Lovers, although I fail to see those connections. I'll do a little research to see what others have to say. Having zipped through Heart the Lover fairly quickly, I'm tempted to read it again, followed by a re-read of Writers & Lovers. 

Writers & Lovers

Writers & Lovers by Lily King

Casey Peabody #1

Fiction

2020 Grove Press

Finished on August 8, 2021

Rating: 4.5/5 (Very Good)

Publisher's Blurb:

Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.

Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years. At thirty-one, Casey is still clutching onto something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, her world fractures even more. Casey's fight to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink.

Writers & Lovers follows Casey--a smart and achingly vulnerable protagonist--in the last days of a long youth, a time when every element of her life comes to a crisis. Written with King's trademark humor, heart, and intelligence, Writers & Lovers is a transfixing novel that explores the terrifying and exhilarating leap between the end of one phase of life and the beginning of another.

I was very excited to read Writers & Lovers (who doesn't love that cover art?!), but the opening chapters (ok, if I'm being honest, it was the first 100 pages) didn't grab me. The writing is very good, but the story failed to pull me in. I finally got hooked when Casey met Oscar and his two young sons at the restaurant at which she works as a waitress. The dialogue in that scene between the children and Casey won me over. I enjoyed the passages centered around Casey and her coworkers, but once her relationship with Oscar began to move forward, the story did as well. This was a slow burn of a read, but worth the effort. As the final chapters drew near, I began to read more slowly, savoring the prose, trying not to finish too quickly. At times humorous and touching, this was a winner! It would be a 5-star read if it hadn't had such a slow beginning. It was so good that I was tempted to reread it as soon as I finished. I didn't care for King's debut novel, The Pleasing Hour, but I'm looking forward to Euphoria.

Highly recommend.