Heart the Lover

In a college seventeenth-century literature class in the 1980s, a young woman is caught up in an intense, formative love triangle with two very different men — a passion that will shape the rest of her life. Decades later, long after graduation and the separate lives they each built, the three are drawn back together, and the choices of their youth resurface with unexpected weight.

Moving between the charged intimacy of their college years and the reckonings of middle age, the novel gradually reveals its narrator to be Casey Peabody, the heroine of Lily King's Writers & Lovers — making this at once a prequel and a sequel, readable from either direction.

Erotically charged and deeply tender, "Heart the Lover" is a moving meditation on desire, art, friendship, and the long shadow cast by the people who mark us.