Heart the Lover
(OverDrive Listen)

Lily King. (2025). Heart the Lover. Unabridged Simon & Schuster Audio.

Lily King. 2025. Heart the Lover. Simon & Schuster Audio.

Lily King, Heart the Lover. Simon & Schuster Audio, 2025.

Lily King. Heart the Lover. Unabridged Simon & Schuster Audio, 2025.

OverDrive Product Record

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Heart the Lover

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keywords

1. • value: new york times bestselling author
2. • value: kirkus prize winner
3. • value: Love and Friendship novel
4. • value: Love and loss themes
5. • value: past and present collision
6. • value: whiting award recipient
7. • value: five tuesdays in winter
8. • value: emotional sensitivity in fiction
9. • value: english department golden boys
10. • value: sam and yash friendship
11. • value: desire and uncertainty themes
12. • value: writers & lovers comparison
13. • value: jordan character story
14. • value: portland maine author
15. • value: college and middle age story
16. • value: college experience novel
17. • value: college senior narrator
18. • value: new england book award winner
19. • value: motherhood challenges fiction
20. • value: tangled relationships novel
21. • value: friendship and love bonds
22. • value: maine book award winner
23. • value: euphoria author
24. • value: life-changing triangle story
25. • value: literary fiction bestseller
26. • value: literary triangle story
27. • value: love and family complexity
28. • value: macdowell fellowship recipient

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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: King, Lily
   • bioText: Lily King is the New York Times bestselling author of five novels, including Euphoria and Writers & Lovers, and the story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her work has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Maine Book Award for Fiction, a MacDowell Fellowship, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Portland, Maine.
   • name: Lily King
2. • role: Narrator
   • fileAs: Lowman, Rebecca
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2025-09-30T00:00:00Z

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title

Heart the Lover

fullDescription

From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, 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 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 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 and her own intellectual ambition. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she 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, the vulnerable days of Jordan's youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and must confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.

Written with superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving love story that celebrates literature, forgiveness, and the transformative bonds that shape our lives. 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.

reviews

1. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content: Lily King’s sixth novel, Heart the Lover, begins with a prologue of only a few sentences: “You knew I’d write a book about you someday. . . . For me it begins here. Like this.” The novel then moves back in time to the late ’80s in an English lit seminar at an unnamed college, where the narrator first encounters talented classmates Sam and Yash. Roommates and best friends, Sam and Yash are house-sitting for a professor. Soon the narrator is hanging out with Sam, Yash and housemate Ivan in the professor’s enchanting old house, and the boys give her a nickname: first Daisy, then Jordan, as in Jordan Baker from The Great Gatsby, because of the golf scholarship that got her into college. Sam pursues Jordan, and the two begin going out. But Sam, a Baptist, is moodily ambivalent about sex, and Jordan can’t stop thinking about the funny, even-keeled Yash. King’s depiction of 1980s college life is spot-on, and Jordan narrates the hurtling love story between herself and Yash—and their guilt about Sam—with all the intensity of college-age love. After a miscommunication, or maybe a ghosting, the novel leaps many years into the future: Jordan is now a novelist, a mom of two little boys, and married to the solid Silas. Out of the blue, Yash, on his way to visit a friend, has come to see Jordan in Maine, where she lives and writes. The novel moves back and forth in time, as Jordan recalls brief encounters with Yash over the years, and then moves ahead again to the present, to the moment when she gets a text from Sam. As with King’s previous novels Euphoria and Writers and Lovers, Heart the Lover features a love triangle, but because this novel is ultimately about the passage of time and how our older selves view the choices we made (or failed to make) when we were young and intense and foolishly stubborn, this love triangle takes a redemptive turn that feels grounded, believable and quite beautiful. Jordan is a wonderful protagonist—funny, despairing, self-deprecating, lonely and determined to write novels. This is a satisfying, emotionally rich tearjerker, a book that just may make you sob out loud.
2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     August 25, 2025
     King revisits the themes of her 2020 novel Writers & Lovers with this alluring if uneven story of fading youth and writerly ambition shaped by a love triangle. The narrator, a successful novelist, looks back on her college years in the 1980s, when she’s nicknamed Jordan—after the mercurial character from The Great Gatsby—by two intellectual boys in her literature class. She begins dating one of them, Sam, a devout Baptist who refuses to have sex before marriage, but soon falls hard for his best friend, Yash, an aspiring writer. Both boys poke fun at the mediocrity of the creative writing workshops she enrolls in, but her writing improves thanks to Sam and Yash’s extracurricular company and their willingness to take her seriously. After Sam graduates and leaves campus, the narrator strikes up a secretive affair with Yash, which ends heartbreakingly at the closing of the novel’s perfect first half. The rest is a mix of shimmering insights and clunky melodrama as the narrator, now married with two children, tries to hold onto her youthful sense of hope in the face of devastating news. As ever, she turns to literature, which she prizes for how it “alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life.” Though this doesn’t quite have the staying power of King’s best work, it’s still hard to resist. Agent: Julie Barer, Book Group.

3. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content: The first part of Heart the Lover begins deceptively as a light-hearted college romance narrated by an unnamed protagonist with creative writing aspirations. She is drawn to the intellectual airs of a couple of male classmates and begins dating one, Sam, which leads to a friendship with his best mate, Yash. Predictably, her relationship with Sam is doomed by his rigid beliefs and abrasive personality, while her friendship with Yash, rooted in shared interests, grows into love. Nicknamed ‘Jordan’ after Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby for her golfing skill, she is torn between feelings for Yash and guilt at betraying his best friend. This triangular set-up echoes her previous novel Writers & Lovers, hinting the story may be a sequel or prequel. Part One features misunderstandings, betrayals and 20-something angst. Parts Two and Three jump decades ahead: Jordan is married to Silas, has two young sons, and is a successful novelist. Regrets about Yash resurface during his brief overnight visit. Later, life becomes more fraught when her oldest son is diagnosed with a rare brain cancer. Things escalate when Yash, who has never moved on, is dying of lung cancer. Tragedies on two fronts threaten to unravel Jordan as she balances heartbreaks of the past with those of the present. King depicts life’s passions with understated precision and excels at dialogue, though the omission of attributions can make exchanges confusing. The final two-thirds are stronger, with the voice of the older, wiser woman more compelling than that of the college ingenue. The title refers to a college card game, with cards named Club the Policeman, Spade the Gardener and Heart the Lover. Reviewed by Anne Green   ABOUT THE AUTHOR Lily King is the award-winning author of six novels. Her most recent novel, Heart the Lover was published on September 30th, 2025. She has also published a collection of short stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her 2020 novel, Writers & Lovers, won the New England Society Book Awards and was a New York Times Notable Book and chosen as a top-ten best book of 2020 by The Washington Post, NPR, People Magazine, and The Los Angeles Times. Her 2014 novel Euphoria won the Kirkus Award, the New England Book Award, and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Award. Euphoria was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review. It was included in TIME's Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014, as well as on Amazon, NPR, Entertainment Weekly, Publishers Weekly, and Salon’s Best Books of 2014. Visit Lily King's website

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shortDescription

From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, 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 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 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 and her own intellectual ambition. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation...

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   • description: Fiction / Literary
2. • code: FIC043000
   • description: Fiction / Coming of Age
3. • code: FIC044000
   • description: Fiction / Contemporary Women