Heart the Lover

Name: Heart the Lover
Author: Lily King

Lily King

TIME Best Books 2025 · New York Times Notable Book of 2025 · NYT Bestseller · The Washington Post Best Books 2025 · Boston Globe Best Books 2025

Our narrator understands good love stories – their secrets, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules. She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined – with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love. Decades later, she is a successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth.

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4.1 average· 1 review

Novelust user

Dec 29, 2025

5.0

Okay fine - five stars for the book that’s leaving me in a tear soaked hoodie against my will. This books is frustrating, beautiful, pretentious, smart, maddening, relatable, & visceral. Can’t say I’d recommend it or enjoyed it - and yet also finished it in less than 24hr because I couldn’t put it down. Arrr ugh!!! 😩