Heart the Lover
4.5 | 22,458 ratings
Price: 14.99
Last update: 02-03-2026
Product details
- ASIN : B0F1ZBZLMS
- Publisher : Grove Press
- Accessibility :
- Publication date : September 30, 2025
- Language : English
- File size : 1.5 MB
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Not Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Print length : 188 pages
- ISBN-13 : 978-0802165183
- Page Flip : Enabled
- Best Sellers Rank:#34 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- Coming of Age Fiction (Kindle Store)
- Women's Literary Fiction
- Customer Reviews:4.54.5 out of 5 stars(22,461)
Top reviews from the United States
- JenniferBeautiful story - a MUST readOne of the best books I've read in ages! There is a lot of power and optimism to be found in literature and this story highlights that in the most beautiful of ways. I am still bouyed by the love conveyed between the characters - absolutely brilliant
- Jenna Goodwin4 starsGood storyline with twists and heartfelt aspect
- Terri CrowtherGreat read!Sometimes a book doesn’t need to be 400 pages to be wonderful. This author brilliantly developed characters and story lines in 188 pages. Great, great read!
- Xine SegalasA Small Book With a Lot of DepthMy niece Annie started a book club this year, and Heart the Lover was our January pick. I was immediately drawn to the cover — the daisy-eyed girl with tears in her eyes — which reminded me of an old edition of The Great Gatsby. There was something nostalgic and vulnerable about it that made me want to open the book right away.
Once I did, I found myself unexpectedly transported back to my college years — falling in love, sitting in English classes near someone who suddenly felt very important, forming friendships that felt like everything at the time. Lily King’s world of Jordan, Yash, and Sam brought back memories of my own circle of friends — learning together, loving each other imperfectly, and making choices without yet understanding their long shadows.
While Heart the Lover can be described as a story about first love, that description barely scratches the surface. The book is layered and thoughtful, full of quiet symbolism and reflection. It’s really about how lives unfold over time, how love changes shape, and how the past doesn’t disappear so much as travel alongside us.
What struck me most is how restrained the writing is. King doesn’t overexplain or dramatize. Instead, meaning accumulates slowly, through small moments and observations. I found myself thinking about my own life while reading — old friendships, old loves, and the ways we become ourselves through both what we choose and what we leave behind.
Readers who enjoyed Writers & Lovers will likely be drawn to this novella as well, though Heart the Lover feels quieter and more reflective. It’s a book that lingers after you’ve finished it, inviting you to keep turning it over in your mind — and maybe to revisit your own memories with a little more tenderness. - J. JamesFeel like I must be missing something...I found this book through an influencer on IG who said it was INCREDIBLE, she could not put it down, best book she's read in ages, etc, etc. Having just finished it, I keep reading the professional reviews quoted here again and again, thinking that they must be for one of her other books. Swoonily romantic? Steeped in sorrow? Remarkable? Best love story of the year? It will knock your socks off? Readers will soak the pages of the last chapter with tears? What?? I don't get it. I cry half a dozen times a day at anything from a sappy commercial to a sad song, but nope - not a single heartstring pulled by this book. Well written, yes, but that does not equate to deep, enjoyable, or memorable and, for me, this book was none of those things. It was OKAY - just forgettable. I really felt no interest in the characters. I would never recommend it when there are so many better choices out there...
- charnora c. simonsmart, fun, readableThis is my first Lily King novel and most certainly will not be my last. After reading a steady flow of rom coms, and contemporary romance books in a row, Heart the Lover, a contemporary fiction novel with a beautiful love story as the backdrop (IMHO), was the palette cleanser that I needed. It’s smartly written but not at all intimidating. From the very first page you will find yourself laughing, intrigued, and invested in the characters. Be prepared to be frustrated. Be prepared to cry.
- Gabby MBrief But Powerful Story About LoveA college senior meets a pair of friends, Sam and Yash, in an upper-level English class. When Sam asks her out, she’s drawn into their world, where they live for free in the home of a professor on sabbatical. As she’s a former scholarship golf player, they quickly nickname her “Jordan” after the Gatsby character. Sam and Jordan have physical chemistry and a decent camaraderie, but the relationship fizzles out, ending on a sour note right around his graduation. Jordan and Yash stay in school another semester and their friendship quickly deepens into more, something much more substantive than what she had with Sam. Both want to be writers, but struggle with the realities of post-graduate life. We then pick up many years later, when Yash stops by the Maine home where Jordan lives with her husband and two sons, their lives having taken very different directions. And a few years after that, Jordan and Yash and Sam are reunited once more for unexpected reasons, with revelations about the past lingering. This book is excellent at creating a mood, and that mood is the kind of desperate romantic longing that may be specific to relationships one has in that heady late teens/early 20s period of our lives. Both the feeling of that sort of “chemistry’s there but the rest of it isn’t, not really, but trying to force it” and the even more overwhelming “this is just so good, everything is so right, please oh please don’t let me mess this up” are powerfully evoked. The book is quite short, only about 250 pages, so there’s not a ton of room for deep psychological investigation, but Lily King knows how to show rather than tell. There’s one instance where Jordan and Sam go to visit his family and he becomes furiously angry with her for turning up downstairs “late” despite the fact that she was never told what time to be ready and she becomes angry in turn for having been set up to fail and looking lackadaisical in front of his family. It tells us so much about their dynamic, about who they are as people and to each other. I also thought King did a brilliant job of capturing the feeling of being older, and happy with the life you’ve chosen, but not able to completely let go of old feelings. Like being a boat against the current borne back ceaselessly into the past, if you will. It’s an elegant, powerful novel with an impact not remotely blunted by its brevity. I really responded to it and recommend it very highly.