L
Lily King
American author
Heart the Lover
Synopsis
In a 1980s college seventeenth-century literature class, a young woman is drawn into an intense love triangle with two very different men — a bond that shapes the rest of her life. Decades later, after they've each built separate lives, the three are pulled back together and the choices of their youth resurface.
Moving between the charged intimacy of their college years and the reckonings of middle age, the novel gradually reveals its unnamed 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.
A meditation on desire, art, friendship, and the long shadow cast by the people who mark us.
Genres
Characters
SamSupporting
One of two brilliant classmates from the narrator's college literature class who become the two points of her love triangle.
YashSupporting
The other of the narrator's two college classmates at the center of the love triangle, whose reappearance decades later drives the novel's present-day timeline.
Frequently asked questions
Has Heart the Lover won any awards?
Heart the Lover became an instant New York Times bestseller on release and was named a best book of 2025 by several major outlets. It has been recognized as a finalist for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and was longlisted for the 2025 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction — it has not won a major book prize to date.