What an experience it was to read this book in my twenties! To experience all over again the excitement and curiosity of first love, to feel the characters’ hearts pound with the unprecedented pain that comes when you lose, for the first time, the person you fell in love with. To find yourself, unfiltered, in the intricate dialectic of someone who is experiencing the same complex choices as you, discovering that you, too, live in this book.
I wasn’t familiar (guiltily) with Lily King: Heart, the Lover is the first book I’ve read by this American author with a captivating pen, capable of creating vivid characters and sustaining an extremely engaging, authentic, and entertaining style from the very first pages. Her dialogue accurately conveys the shyness of first love; sexuality is described with delicacy, without ever slipping into candid modesty; feelings never become clichés. Everything is in its place. Everything is clear in the reader’s mind, who truly feels as if they’re there: first in the university classrooms, then in the sumptuous home where the stories of Sam, Yash, and Jordan intertwine.
Jordan, the anonymous protagonist’s nickname, is an aspiring writer, still caught between university debt, odd jobs to support herself, and a cold, crowded house where she spends her final year of college. During a literature class, she is noticed by Sam and Yash, top of the class, misunderstood geniuses and accomplished academics, who immediately captivate the reader with their aura of intellectual twenty-somethings.
Sam is a staunch Catholic: precise, diligent, gruff, and anxious. Yash, a skilled cook, is more shrewd, brilliant, and funny: a born dreamer. In that final year of college, as the anxiety of graduation and the future grows ever more pressing, the three characters make choices destined to inexorably change the course of their lives.
From that university lecture, the young protagonist is suddenly catapulted into the lives of the two boys, unaware that she is destined to upend them—and be upended in turn. It is precisely thanks to Sam and Yash that Jordan learns to take herself more seriously, to dream of a future, to experience academic fervor, and to start writing again. The young woman, dreamy and vulnerable, begins to admire their endless discussions, their constant references to great authors (which, I admit, might annoy some readers), the fun of a banal card game that, after all, isn’t so banal…
Then, suddenly, the novel stops—or perhaps begins again. King catapults us decades forward, when the carefree freedom of university has become an uninhabited place. Jordan, in fact, has realized her dream and lives happily within the family she has built for herself, until a visit, and then a phone call, bring the indecisiveness of the past back to the center of the narrative, upending the hard-won balance. Everything becomes regret. Everything goes from being right to seeming wrong.
Get your tissues ready: Lily King knows exactly how to move her readers, recounting that precise moment when the dreams of your twenties shatter without asking permission. The author reminds us that life often takes unpredictable turns and that planning for the future is never truly helpful, because—as Jordan herself learns—”past and future don’t exist” and “this is the only moment we have, and then this, and then this…”
And it is precisely in this fluctuating timeframe that you will find all the love experienced and then locked away in a drawer. A love that never truly goes away, but that in the mists of time only learns to change shape.
Written by Maria De Gennaro
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Lily King, Cuore l’innamorato, Fazi, Roma, 2025
Original edition: Heart the Lover, Grove Press, New York, 2025