Lily King’s sixth novel’s luminous prose and treatment of gender politics compel you to read it in a single sitting The multi-award-winning American novelist Lily King (63), who was nominated for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, is also on the shortlist of this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction for her sixth novel, Heart the Lover. The title is billed as both a prequel and a sequel to her earlier bestselling novel, Writers & Lovers. It functions well independently too and its luminous prose and gender politics compel you to read it in a single sitting.The story begins in a lecture room probably much like this one. (Shutterstock)King notes that she was raging against the Trump administration and thinking that a literary response would be fitting when she began writing a “political murder mystery”. But while she was working on it, in 2019, she lost “two dear old friends … a month apart”. The coronavirus presented itself shortly thereafter, creating havoc worldwide. Something else also came King’s way — Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake. King recollects Patchett having fun. She wanted to have fun too and so she quit the murder mystery and started writing about the characters who appear in Heart the Lover. At that point, she did not know that, through this, she would end up grieving her friends, her parents.320pp, ₹599; Grove PrThe first page of the first part of the novel appears to serve as its prologue. Only five-sentence long, it ends with: “For me it begins here. Like this.” The admission can be appreciated only when you’re done reading this novel. Each narration has its inherent motivations, and King’s seems to be the conviction that stories told by men and women are different, and that this one would be owned by a woman. It would be told without inhibitions and reservations and would be about the other principal protagonists — Yash and Sam.The narrator meets them — or sees them for the first time — in a lecture room where their professor is sharing his thoughts on the students’ papers on The History of Life and Death by Francis Bacon. She notices their hair first: “one with coppery brown hair and the other with a thick black ponytail”. They aren’t her classmates, though; she assumes them to be the professor’s Teaching Assistants. The reader expects a love triangle, which does materialise eventually. The narrative of this intellectually engaging literary page-turner is revealed through dialogue that brims with witty one-liners on love, life, and literature. Sample this: “There’s so much he expects me to know.” This is right at the start of the novel when the narrator visits the “copper-haired” Sam’s house, which isn’t his house but that of “Professor Gastric”, whose real name is Gastrell. Yash lives with Sam, along with another person. For now, our narrator is sort of dating Sam. Like many men who try to project an alpha personality, he expects women to know things without communicating with them properly. Turns out, he is “unreadable”, can’t express much (“doesn’t explain why I can’t touch him”), and maintains his machismo. In comparison, Yash’s character feels elevated. He is “even-keeled” but wears a “mask around other women”, the narrator notices, and appears unmasked before her. Is this intentional? Or was it his helplessness before her? It may as well be a form — or signal — of love, which does materialise between the two. The end of their love feels like “losing a lung” to the narrator. Living becomes remembering, coping with what has been lived. No one knows this better than a writer who regurgitates such experiences. Naturally, the narrator has become a successful writer. She has a husband, Silas, and two boys — Harry and Jack. The latter has health problems and it feels like life for the narrator would end once more if something happened to him. But the world doesn’t close in on itself. It opens up when the past presents itself on her doorstep. She ruminates: “What do you know and why are you here?”After their breakup, she and Yash see each other again. The family and Yash play “Sir Hincomb Funnibuster”, the card game that Ivan, a college friend, had taught the trio. The kids know the game too and are in disbelief: how did the family game get out? King effectively demonstrates the betrayal that children feel when they learn novel things about their parents. This isn’t entirely different from what young people experience when they first fall in love. Yash’s presence makes the narrator feel awkward; it’s a secret that bothers her too much and must be outed. But when is ever the right time to do that?Sometimes secrets can come across as clever ploys. Like the murder of the Iranian girl Cyra at the university. King writes, “It feels like one of my jobs, to remember her.” But life would go on (without her, them) in this novel as it does in real life, which is also a game of cards. For women, often, it’s a losing game. So, the narrator thinks: let the secret be, what’s the use now?Author Lily King (Courtesy lilykingbooks.com)Sam, who had a “Madonna-whore complex”, and Yash too, had to reappear somewhere in the second half again. But how they do is unexpected. If, right after the first half, the novel appears to slow down, certain conflicts reenergise it as if it were a person navigating high-tides in the middle of an ocean on a moonlit night. The reader is as overwhelmed as the narrator, who notes: “I couldn’t trust you again with my heart.” Yet, both continue — the narrator and the reader, knowing fully that what will transpire will break their hearts.Reading this novel would make a hopeless romantic stop multiple times and run for a tissue box, but this reviewer put up a very Sam-like resolve: hurt but pretending not to be. By the end, though, I was desperate to know what made King write it. Nothing prepared me for The Teenage Love That Changed My Life, her essay in Vogue.The Céline passage in the novel and the “edge-of-the-lips kiss” in the essay hit hard. So did the deaths noted in the latter, which ends with: “Love changes form, but not strength. It rushes through our lives like a great river. It is unpredictable. It changes course. And all we can do, all we must do, is keep our heart open and let it come.” At that point, I did finally run for a tissue box because, unlike the narrator, I felt the aching absence of someone telling me, “You are here.”Saurabh Sharma is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. They can be found on Instagram/X: @writerly_life.