Lily King’s new novel is about falling in and out of love and pursuing a rewarding friendship.
| Photo Credit: Getty Images
Reading about love, heartbreak, and simply carrying on with life through Lily King’s prose is a novel experience. Her latest novel, Heart the Lover (Canongate Books), shortlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize, is billed both as a prequel and sequel to her previous work, Writers & Lovers (2020).The singular voice of the narrator is striking. The way King mines the intellectual underpinnings of the narrator’s experiences in her final year of college — falling in and out of love and pursuing a rewarding friendship — is remarkable. Of first loves or otherwise, this is truly a story about a lover, who, despite a broken heart, manages to persevere. Edited excerpts from a conversation with King:Question: Was it a conscious choice, or did it emerge organically, to make such an intellectually rich story a pleasurable read?Answer: Everything in my work, except for a vague idea of a few characters and a possible source of tension, happens organically, as I am writing. I could never set out to make something pleasurable for the reader — I feel like that is out of my control, what the reader feels. But I did know that Jordan [the narrator] would be meeting two guys who were more intellectually ambitious than any other students she’d meet at the university, and that her interactions with them would alter the course of her life in many ways. I also knew that I wanted to write about a big first love and a big first heartbreak. I find both those plot lines very pleasurable, but there’s no guarantee the reader will.
