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Heart the Lover

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Heart the Lover

By: Lily King
Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman
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Summary

“You knew I’d write a book about you someday.”

Our narrator understands good love stories – their secrets, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the rules.

She was in her senior year of college when star students Sam and Yash swept her into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. Their lives became quickly intertwined – with friendship but also with unpredictable passions and the intimations of first love.

Decades later, she is successful writer, living a comfortable life with her husband and children, when a surprise visit brings the past crashing into the present, forcing her to confront the decisions and deceptions of her youth.

Written with the precision of poetry and the emotional tide of an epic, Heart the Lover is a celebration of literature and the life-long echoes of young love.

This is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.

©2025 Lily King (P)2025 Canongate Books Ltd Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Emotionally Gripping Heartfelt Tear-jerking Thought-Provoking Inspiring
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A stunning book with a second half that keeos you hooked until the very last page. Heart the Lover takes you right back to your college days, I felt like I was in the room with these characters. A detailed love story like no other I have read.
The writing is superb.

Heart The Lover

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Some books take you to dark places and make you think. This is just plain miserable!.
Basically, girl has strange family, goes to college, meets strange, religious boy, falls in love, realtionship ends.
Girl starts relationship with ex's best friend, falls in love, he dumps her and she has their baby adopted.
Girl gets married, has two sons writes a couple of books.
Then - the rest of the book is spent with the first boyfriend at the bedside of the second boyfriend whilst he dies of cancer. In between hanging on the side of the dying man's bed, she is having conversations with her teenage son who is about to undergo a potentially life changing brain operation. It appears that her saintly husband thinks it is perfectly fine to let their son make his own way to the hospital (on the other side of the country) whilst you hang out with a couple of your ex boyfriends.
Second boyfreind dies - the end.
If you decide that this is just your kind of thing, then make sure that you read it on a sunny day or have the Samaritans on speed dial.

Depressing

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Binged this book in 2 days and was so sad when it came to the end. Wish I could unhear it and start all over again!

Loved it!

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this book was incredible. deep, beautifully written, captivating, heartbreaking. it reminds you to seize life and make every day count.

I felt everything!!

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What a beautiful story and so eloquently written. I want to read everything Lily writes

My heart is shattered

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