REVIEWS FOR HEART THE LOVER
“Mention Lily King to a group of readers and eyes light up. The handful of novels she has published since her 1999 debut, “The Pleasing Hour,” have elevated her into the company of cherished authors such as Ann Patchett and Elizabeth Strout. What makes her work so appealing? “Heart the Lover,” her sixth novel, provides some answers.”
— Oct. 9, 2025, The Wall Street Journal by Heller McAlpin
“King is a master of sexual tension, of the slow build, of gratification torturously delayed…'Heart the Lover’ is her best work yet.”
–– September 30, 2025, New York Times by Lauren Christensen
"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
“[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
“[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
"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