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Heart the Lover
Lily King
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INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
“Lily King has written another masterpiece. This book overflows with her brilliance and her heart. We are so lucky.” —Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author of This Time Tomorrow
From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, and the lasting impact of first love.
You knew I’d write a book about you someday.
Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.
In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.
Decades later, the vulnerable days of Jordan's youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and must confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.
Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving love story that celebrates literature, forgiveness, and the transformative bonds that shape our lives. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, 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.
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Posts about this title from Ronnica Reads
Ronnica Reads\
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Ronnica Fatt\
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• Mar 4
When I decided to read the longlist for the Women's Prize for Fiction, I didn't realize how many I'd have already read and loved! That confirms my commitment to read the rest (most of which haven't been published in the US, or at least not yet). Here are my thoughts on those I've already read. I think that every one of these has earned it's placed on this list, and has important things to say about our world today.\
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Wild Dark Shore by Charlotte McConaghy 5/5 Stars This was my first Charlotte McConaghy. I loved the balance between an intriguing plot and well-drawn characters.\
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The Correspondent by Virginia Evans 5/5 Stars One of my favorite books I've read so far this year. The characters really come to life through this epistolary novel.\
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Heart the Lover by Lily King 5/5 Stars This made me ugly cry. I love Lily King's writing.\
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Moderation by Elaine Castillo 4.75/5 Stars This one I was most surprised to be on this list, but it's a very pleasant surprise. I need more people to read this dystopian book on the future of content moderation. It also has a lot to say about immigrant labor.\
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A Guardian and a Thief by Megha Majumdar 4.5/5 Stars I'm still thinking about this one. This is not a happy read, but a necessary one.\
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Audition by Katie Kitamura 4/5 Stars Katie is one of my favorite authors but this is actually my least favorite of hers. This one is unique and will leave you thinking.\
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Flashlight by Susan Choi 3.75/5 Stars This is a well-written book with a plot that is a little clunky. Not surprised it's on this list.\
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Dominion by Addie E. Citchens 3.5/5 Stars I'm happy to see this book on this list, though it was a hard read for me with my background in the evangelical church.\
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A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing by Alice Evelyn Yang 3.25/5 Stars I think I read this at the wrong time for me. I did enjoy the discussion of living with memory loss.
Early Thoughts on the Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist
9 books
3
Ronnica Reads\
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Ronnica Fatt\
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• Jan 31
My 5 best reads of 768 books in 2025.
My 5 best reads of 768 books in 2025. #bestbooks2025 #booktok
5 books
Posts about this book from across Bindery
Betty's Bookish Thoughts\
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Betty\
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• May 10
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Welcome to Betty Bookish Thoughts!
Consider this a mini introduction to my bookish taste and loves!
If I can’t choose just one genre to love, why not all?! 🥰 There are too many books and authors I admire whose characters and words speak to me and make their worlds feel real. Let me know which books resonate with you, and I’d love to hear your own bookish responses as well (in particular, I want to know which books made you ugly cry 🤭)!
42 books
2-Spirit Bookshelf\
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(@Indigenousbookshelf)\
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• Apr 29
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I haven’t been posting much about what I’ve been reading so here are some thoughts on books I’ve read recently!\
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Monstrilio- SO worth the hype. I loved how real this story felt despite being tilted with a grim fantasy strangeness. I find that takes a really talented and creative writer. It is beautiful but totally gutting (pun….intended). I can’t wait to see more from this author.\
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Best quote “god is a scumbag“ lmaoo\
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How to Lose Everything- this hurt my heart so much. The title says it all- someone who really loses everything. And this is felt hard while reading. The author is a queer Indigenous woman who went through hell but still grew a life blooming with flowers and joy. A very empowering memoir.\
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Heart the Lover- I had super high hopes for this one and I think it met them?? It was extremely well written. I didn’t love the plot but the writing was so engaging, I really felt like I too was experiencing everything the characters were going through. The references to other renowned works was a cool element in this one. Also, the card game I am dying to play because it sounds so good lol who wants to play Sir Hincomb Funnibuster???\
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Lost Lambs- Major ICK. How does this have so many rave reviews? It’s racist and ableist as fuck.\
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There is a way to portray shitty characters and this just isn’t it. I don’t even feel comfortable typing out the quotes. 🥴 gross\
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Rapid Reviews Reading Update
4 books
4
1
Reading Fools\
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Marston Quinn\
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• Mar 16
Join for free
[Greetings Fools, \
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March has been a great reading month for me and I wanted to pass on the books I've enjoyed so far.\
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- Alchemised by SenLinYu. One of the top selling books of 2025, this dark romance / dark fantasy is a bleak adaption of Manacled, a sprawling Harry Potter fan fiction the author wrote several years ago. This book is not for everyone, but I really enjoyed the worldbuilding and subversion of some standard fantasy tropes. \
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- Heart the Lover by Lily King. I inhaled this book and loved the experience. Two chapters of a woman's live, and the men in them, are examined decades apart. You can read it in an afternoon. It's a moving meditation on growing up, getting hurt, and loving people all the same. \
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- Role Model by Rachel Reid. Another Heated Rivalry book, and perhaps my favorite so far, as it deals extensively with toxic masculinity and the quest (internally) to overcome it. Relatable. \
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- Sold by Patricia McCormick. The latest in my banned books series. A difficult subject but accessible read about a young Nepali girl trafficked into India. Video coming soon.](https://readingfools.binderybooks.com/item/nUWoCWCcPrfiYoUrpjeT/)
Reading Update - 3/16/26
4 books
2
Ronnica Reads\
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Ronnica Fatt\
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• Mar 4
Early Thoughts on the Women's Prize for Fiction Longlist
9 books
3
Eclectic Reads\
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Kass\
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• Feb 3
Join for free
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Join for free or login](https://eclecticreads.binderybooks.com/item/2l3ZchxFnvlaGTl42FWg/)
January 2026 Reading Wrap Up
before anyone asks, yes i did read all of these books and yes i can tell you the synopsis of all of them to prove it.
•Voice of War
•Stones of Light
•Bonds of Chaos
•Child of the Night Guild
•Hammerfall
•Bones
•The Exiled
•Heart the Lover
•The Poet Empress
•Empire of the Vampire
•Lady of Darkness
•Weavingshaw
•The Correspondent
•The Prison Healer
•The Guilded Cage
•The Lies of Locke Lamora
•Theo of Golden
•Depths of Vanalf
•Pillars of the Earth
•Queen of Faces
•We Who Will Die
•Toothsucker
•This Safe Darkness
#booktok #bookfyp #bookrecs #fantasybooks #literaryfiction
13 books
3
Ronnica Reads\
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Ronnica Fatt\
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• Jan 31
My 5 best reads of 768 books in 2025.
My 5 best reads of 768 books in 2025. #bestbooks2025 #booktok
5 books
Sunny's Book Truck\
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CJ\
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• Dec 2 2025
Join for free
Poll:\
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What should we read in January?\
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Friends! Enemies! Everyone in between!\
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It's time to vote for the January (2026?!?!?!) book club pick. I asked the Bindery Discord channel (a private channel if you're a free follower or paid member to Bindery, which if you're receiving this... you are lol) for some suggestions and this is where we landed. I like to keep Sunny's picks as new hardcover releases to account for the $30 book club sign up fee, so new releases are usually the focus.\
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Rippling with humor, warmth, and style, Lost Lambs is a new vision of the charms and pitfalls of family dysfunction. The Flynn family is coming undone. Catherine and Bud's open marriage has reached its breaking point as their daughters spiral in their own chaotic orbits: Abigail, the eldest, is dating a man in his twenties nicknamed War Crime Wes; Louise, the middle child, maintains a secret correspondence with an online terrorist; the brilliant youngest, Harper, is being sent to wilderness reform camp due to her insistence that someone―or something―is monitoring the town’s citizens.\
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Casting a shadow across their lives, and their small coastal town, is Paul Alabaster, a billionaire shipping magnate. Rumors of corruption circulate, but no one dares dig too deep. No one except Harper, whose obsession with a mysterious shipping container sends the family hurtling into a criminal conspiracy―one that may just bring them closer together.\
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Irreverent and addictive, pinging between the voices of the Flynn family and those of the panorama of characters around them, Madeline Cash’s Lost Lambs is a debut novel of quick-witted observation and surprising tenderness. With it, Cash has crafted a family saga for the twenty-first century, all held together with crazy glue.\
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One woman, the performance of a lifetime. Or two. An exhilarating, destabilizing Möbius strip of a novel that asks whether we ever really know the people we love.\
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Two people meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. She’s an accomplished actress in rehearsals for an upcoming premiere. He’s attractive, troubling, young—young enough to be her son. Who is he to her, and who is she to him? In this compulsively readable, brilliantly constructed novel, two competing narratives unspool, rewriting our understanding of the roles we play every day – partner, parent, creator, muse – and the truths every performance masks, especially from those who think they know us most intimately.\
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Taut and hypnotic, Audition is Katie Kitamura at her virtuosic best.\
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From the New York Times bestselling author of Writers & Lovers comes a magnificent and intimate new novel of desire, friendship, and the lasting impact of first love\
\
You knew I’d write a book about you someday.\
\
Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.\
\
In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. But youthful passion is unpredictable, and soon she finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.\
\
Decades later, the vulnerable days of Jordan's youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news bring the past crashing into the present, she returns to a world she left behind and must confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.\
\
Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving love story that celebrates literature, forgiveness, and the transformative bonds that shape our lives. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, 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.\
\
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From “the shrewdest writer on contemporary masculinity we have” ( Esquire), a “captivating...hypnotic...virtuosic” ( The Baffler) novel about a man whose life veers off course due to a series of unforeseen circumstances.\
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Teenaged István lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. Shy and new in town, he is a stranger to the social rituals practiced by his classmates and is soon isolated, drawn instead into a series of events that leave him forever a stranger to peers, his mother, and himself. In the years that follow, István is born along by the goodwill, or self-interest, of strangers, charting a rocky yet upward trajectory that lands him further from his childhood, and the defining events that abruptly ended it, than he could possibly have imagined.\
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A collection of intimate moments over the course of decades, Flesh chronicles a man at odds with himself—estranged from and by the circumstances and demands of a life not entirely under his control and the roles that he is asked to play. Shadowed by the specter of past tragedy and the apathy of modernity, the tension between István and all that alienates him hurtles forward until sudden tragedy again throws life as he knows it in jeopardy.\
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“Spare and detached on the page, lush in resonance beyond it” (NPR), Flesh traces the imperceptible but indelible contours of unresolved trauma and its aftermath amid the precarity and violence of an ever-globalizing Europe with incisive insight, unyielding pathos, and startling humanity.\
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Four very compelling choices! Happy voting and remember we are reading The House of Beauty by Arabelle Sicardi in December.
Vote for the January book club pick ❄️
4 books
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