REVIEWS FOR HEART THE LOVER
"Even I, who married my college sweetheart more than 40 happy years ago, read Lily King’s new novel about what might have been in a state of blubbery longing . . . Heart The Lover is nostalgia distilled in black ink . . . King captures [her protagonist's] guileless sense of awe with just a dusting of parody that never grows silly or bitter . . . And what’s particularly remarkable is how subtly King ages her narrator, preserving the kernel of that young woman’s openhearted urgency in the older woman’s complex voice . . . Only Lily King could tell a story so steeped in sorrow and so filled with hope."
— Ron Charles, Washington Post
“Lily King has been steadily building a reputation as a writer who captures the acute landscape of early love – relationships difficult to disentangle from the process of becoming an adult…It’s an enveloping and sly book, building heft in a manner as mysterious as affairs of the heart.”
— October 2025, Vogue
“[T]his affecting novel…questions whether a person can inhabit any moment other than the present.”
— October 2025, New Yorker
“It stands as one of the most emotionally devastating and soulfully wise novels I have ever read . . . Like all of King’s fiction, Heart The Lover is literary without pretension, emotional without maudlin sentimentality . . . heartrending, swoonily romantic, rigorously clear-sighted."
— September 23, 2025, Boston Globe by Priscilla Gilmore
“[Y]oung 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.”
— BookPage starred review
“[A]chingly, gloriously sincere…These are young people who want to fall into big feelings but also wonder if they can handle them at the same time.”
— September 27, 2025, Chicago Tribune by John Warner
"Witty, insightful . . . sharp, funny company . . . Jordan’s first-person narration is so observant and distinctive that we feel like we know her.”
— September 24, 2025, Minneapolis Star Tribune by Chris Hewitt