Read Date: 10/11/2025
Summary (incl. main characters, stakes, setting)
The setting is college (unspecified location on the East Coast), and the female protagonist, nicknamed Jordan, is a senior. She meets two men in class, Sam and Yash. Sam first approaches her and asks her on a date. They date for a bit but their relationship is a bit doomed and toxic—he’s super religious, she isn’t. They don’t really find conversation exciting, their main bond is physicality. During their first breakup she finds herself most bemoaning the loss of her friendship with his best friend Yash, who is humorous and charming. Jordan and Sam officially break up. Jordan has also decided to stay an extra semester to write a thesis and take a seminar with Professor Gattrell who’s a big influence on Sam and Yash’s college experience. This decision to pursue her academic / writing dreams more seriously comes from Sam and Yash (and their other friend Ivan). She learns so much more about writing through Dr. Felske, her advisor, and this is really the start of her calling. Jordan thinks about Yash a lot and they reconnect when he leaves his divorced parents at home (he doesn’t really love being around them, kind of avoidant). They have a cute are-they-aren’t-they date and then fall into a whirlwind romance, punctuated by the dramas of confessing their relationship to Sam—who seems very displeased—and periodic withdrawals of Yash when he’s around either Sam and his friends, or his father who he has a tense relationship with. Jordan goes to Paris after getting introduced to a job there after graduating, while Yash is finishing school. They write letters, Jordan anxiously awaiting their arrival but perhaps not revealing how important they are to her. Yash comes and is offered a job in Paris as well which he wants to take, but bails after a phone call with his dad where he decides to be more practical, save up, and move to New York. Jordan’s sad to leave Paris but she decides to choose love, and they plan to move to NYC. They’re supposed to meet up at the airport but Yash never shows, instead choosing to move to Atlanta where Sam is. This devastates Jordan because she’s actually five months pregnant, and was about to tell Yash. Instead they break up (mostly through her avoidance of his calls, attempts to apologize) and she gives up the baby for adoption, deepening her bond with her mother who takes care of her during this time. Fast forward 10-15 years, Yash has come to meet Jordan and her two sons and husband in Maine. The two have not seen each other in a decade. Jordan doesn’t really know why he’s come. The visit is colored with tangled memories of each other, card games (where the title Heart the Lover comes from), and how as an adult complicated feelings coexist without explanation—your current partner meeting your former lover, a longing and what if from youth. Another few years later, Jordan finds out Yash has cancer. She is dealing with illness in her own family, with her son needing rounds of brain surgery and suffering from seizures. Jordan goes to visit Yash and the two reconnect. Sam is there and it’s really not a big deal. Jordan sees how Yash has always been cautious and a bit flighty or noncommittal, and how she could also seem like the bad one who didn’t let him come back. She tells Yash about their baby and after the initial shock, he is happier and at peace to leave the world knowing that he has a child in the world. As Jordan flies to her family, she is notified that Yash dies. The novel ends with her in her husband Silas’ arms, reminding her that she’s in the present. We find out Jordan is actually Casey from Writers and Lovers.
How I discovered it (rec, why now)
New release 2025, read Lily King’s Writers and Lovers and enjoyed it so put this on Libby holds pretty early on.
How I felt (thoughts on writing, themes, plot, pacing)
It’s been a while since I TORE through a book like this one. After a slow-ish start (though it was very good from the very beginning), from 14% onward I read it in one Saturday morning sitting. It was a perfect length of a book, though the last part dragged a bit with the rotating characters in Yash’s orbit (idc!! though I get it for the ambiance of a hospital in one’s dying days). I love novels that show restraint and emotion, and Lily King nails it. The difference in Casey’s emotional state, the longing and then the maturity, but still a sense of being carried away by emotion as one is when they feel so strongly. Casey and Yash’s relationship was so beautiful and gripping. I loved their intellectual banter and their sweet romance. And as frustrated as I was by Yash not showing up, it also completely made sense for a person to choose rationality and practicality over love, especially as a child of divorced parents. The romance was icing on the cake, but I’m left thinking a lot of that choice—creativity and instability/debt, the commitment Casey has to her writing (which is delved into further in Writers and Lovers), the ways in which so many beautifully intelligent and creative people choose other paths and feel that mourning in their soul even though their lives are fine (like Yash complaining about being a suit as a litigator, though his boss seems to love him). The novel was billed as a love triangle from the description, and though that was a big part of the beginning it didn’t really amount to much?
Who would like it
Readers of Sally Rooney, Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett, Emma Straub
Top quotes
- ‘Isn’t love a form of hope?’ I said. ‘No. Love is crushing. Love is something you let yourself feel at your own peril, despite your better sense.’
- ‘Eternity as a concept is a bit terrifying,’ he says. ‘Only if time exists as we experience it. Which we know it does not. Without time, eternity loses its bite.’
- I didn’t want to be like my father, saddled with responsibility so young. History repeating itself. And I wasn’t sure you understood the consequences—’ ‘Consequences? Let’s talk about consequences, Yash. I was pregnant. I was five months pregnant in that Delta terminal waiting for you.’
- Eternalism is the belief that everything that is, has been, and will be exists right now and forever, all at once. Presentism is the belief that only what exists in the present exists at all. Nothing before and nothing after.
- I’ve noticed that about people who had stable childhoods. They like to create their own problems.