Heart the Lover is a novel by the American writer Lily King, published by Grove Press (an imprint of Grove Atlantic) in its first hardcover edition in October 2025. It appeared from the same New York publishing house that issued much of King’s earlier fiction. The novel carries an author’s note acknowledging that its embedded short story, attributed to the fictional writer Ray Hart, was inspired by a real short story by David Updike, and it draws its epigraph from Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s Journey to the End of the Night in Ralph Manheim’s translation—a passage that becomes thematically central to the book itself.
Heart the Lover is literary fiction: specifically a retrospective love story and a künstlerroman, the portrait of an artist’s coming-of-age. It blends the campus or college novel (its first movement is set among bookish undergraduates) with the elegiac deathbed narrative of its final movement. It is also, structurally, a novel of memory—a first-person reckoning told across roughly three decades, in which the act of remembering and the act of writing are inseparable.
The novel’s opening movement is steeped in the cultural texture of the 1980s American university: a campus screening of The Deer Hunter, Prince blasting at an outdoor bar, the social machinery of sororities and fraternities, and a literary undergraduate culture in which students measure each other by which famous professors they have studied with. King grounds her young characters in a thick web of literary and intellectual allusion—Joyce, Augustine, Dante, Henry James, Ovid, Hume—that signals both their privilege and their earnest hunger to take their own minds seriously. The later movements move into adulthood and confront contemporary realities of class, illness, and care: the crushing weight of student debt and an artist’s precarious income; reproductive choice and adoption; and the grinding intimacy of long-term caregiving for a chronically ill child and a dying friend. The book is alert throughout to how women, in particular, absorb emotional and bodily labor that others cannot or will not see—a concern that connects King’s 1980s campus world to its present-day hospital room.
