From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, loss, and the lasting impact of first love

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.

This book gets every single star from me. There’s no way I can adequately say what this book did to me. In a nutshell, it unraveled me. I haven’t been this moved by the complexity of relationships since Hello, Beautiful. At its heart, this is a story about friendship. The kind that shapes who you become in your formative years, and the kind that stays with you long after the people drift in different directions.

At its core, this is a novel about the type of deep, formative, life-shaping friendships that never die. The kind that changes the way you see yourself and the world, the kind you carry with you even when decades pass and life moves on. I am a sucker for that kind of story. My closest friendships matter more to me than almost anything, so when a book understands how love can exist between friends with just as much intensity as romance, I’m already halfway gone.

Lily King wastes no time pulling you in. The narrator, Jordan, meets Sam and Yash during her senior year of college. The two young men are brilliant, charismatic, and inseparable. Best friends living together, finishing each other’s sentences, sparring intellectually, playing cards late into the night. When they invite Jordan into their orbit, it complicates things (and that’s all I’ll say).

What unfolds is not a neat love triangle. It’s messier than that. It’s layered with loyalty, jealousy, yearning, and the kind of emotional confusion that only exists when you’re young and smart and certain that feelings alone will guide you safely through life. Choices are made. Lines are crossed. Some things are left unsaid. And those moments echo forward in ways that none of them can predict.

What impressed me most is how grounded this story feels. Literary fiction can sometimes drift into abstraction or keep the reader at arm’s length. That didn’t happen here. Not once. The writing is precise and emotionally rich without being indulgent. Every scene matters. Every conversation builds something. At just over 250 pages, this book is tight, intentional, and devastating in its restraint.

I started reading around 5:30 PM and finished just after 8:30. I didn’t get up. I didn’t check my phone. I barely breathed. I laughed out loud. I felt that slow, dull ache settle into my chest. And yes, I cried. More than once. This book understands how meaningful friendships work.

The first half is wonderful. We get to see the relationships develop and fall apart and heal and break. The second half of the novel shifts into adulthood, and this is where the emotions really hit. Jordan has built the life she once wanted. The intensity of her youth feels safely tucked away. Until it isn’t. A surprise visit and unexpected news pull her back into that old world, forcing her to look directly at the choices she made and the people she loved most.

This will absolutely land on my end-of-year top ten list. I already know it. It’s tender, wise, painful, and achingly beautiful. I will never forget these characters, and I’ll think about them often. This is one of those rare books that reminds you why you read in the first place.