Few contemporary American novelists write about intimacy with the emotional intelligence of Lily King. Across six novels, she has built a body of work concerned with women’s interior lives — ambition, desire, artistic identity, and the way love can both expand and derail a life. Heart the Lover starts where many of King’s novels do, with a young woman on the edge of adulthood, intoxicated by love and intellectual excitement. But it quickly becomes something bigger, a story about consequences, and how early attachments stay with us across decades of our lives.
At first, Heart the Lover resembles a classic campus novel. A bright young woman, two brilliant men, “swept into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games”, with the charged intensity of first love. King uses the love triangle — among the oldest and most reliable engines of literary fiction/friction — as a framework to explore power, ambition, artistic awakening, and the injuries that shape who we are long after youth has passed.
This is a novel awash with literary references. Jordan’s nickname is a nod to Jordan Baker from The Great Gatsby (the boys agree that she’s not a “Daisy”). The boys live in Breach House, the name of DH Lawrence’s childhood home, echoing his fascination with love triangles and domestic entanglement.
Jordan is an aspiring writer in her final year of college in the 1980s. She’s drawn into the orbit of Sam and Yash, “two smart guys” in the front row of her 17th-century literature class who speak with authority and move through academic life with ease and entitlement. They live in a beautiful house owned by a professor and are treated as intellectual heirs apparent. Jordan, by contrast, works to support herself and is keenly aware of her peripheral status, despite her excellent grades.
What begins as friendship soon turns into something more complicated. Jordan first gets involved with Sam, whose strong religious faith — he’s a staunch Baptist — means he insists on chastity. Their relationship is close but constrained and charged with longing and frustration. Their sex, Jordan tells a friend, is “everything but”. Yash, more volatile and charismatic, pulls her in a different direction. “I was the one who pointed you out to Sam, you know,” Yash says during a non-date dinner. “I noticed you. First.”
King handles this material with care rather than melodrama. The sexual tension is real, but so is the intellectual closeness. These are young people who fall in love through talk — through books, arguments, jokes, and shared references. For Jordan, the relationship is tied to her growing sense of herself as a writer. Loving Sam and Yash is also about wanting access to their world of ideas, confidence and possibility.
For Jordan, these relationships are inseparable from her awakening sense of herself as a writer. Loving Sam and Yash is also about wanting to belong to their world of ideas and confidence.
Heart the Lover does not romanticise this period. Even in the rush of first love, the imbalance is clear. Jordan sees how professors favour Sam and Yash, how opportunities come easily to them, and how her own talent is less noticed. What she lacks at the time, and what the novel later provides, is the language to name what she is experiencing.
The novel unfolds in three parts, moving forward in time until it inevitably reaches its tragic conclusion.
Years later, Jordan is a successful novelist and a happily married mother of two daughters. But when she is drawn back into contact with her former lovers, the emotional structures of her youth reassert themselves. This is where the novel is strongest — in showing that first love does not disappear but settles into the psyche as unfinished business rather than nostalgia.
This is much more than a love story. Jordan is no longer the young woman who believed love could be neatly chosen or easily resolved. She understands that desire can coexist alongside regret and that adulthood offers no protection from emotional reckoning.
King’s prose is controlled and precise and she avoids sentimentality. The intimacy of the first-person narration keeps the reader close to Jordan’s inner life, while the shifting timelines provide the distance needed for reflection.
For readers of the brilliant Writers & Lovers, Heart the Lover is a prequel and companion, filling in an earlier chapter of Jordan’s life. But it stands on its own as a study of how early love establishes a person’s sense of self. It asks what it means to live with the knowledge that some versions of ourselves are only visible in retrospect.
It’s only right that Heart the Lover was widely named among the best books of 2025. King’s emotional depth and craft reinforce her status as a major contemporary literary novelist.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.