Lily King’s understands good love stories- their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls, suffused with love triangles that even the narrator’s 12-year-old son at some point tells her that he has been invited to be part of a thruple which he declines.

His mother, the narrator whose name we are not told until the final lines of the book. In the fall of her senior year of college. She meets two students from her 17^th century Lit class: Sam who had coppery brown hair and Yash with a thick black pontytail. 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.  The girl knew the boys by their hairstyles because they sat at the front of one of her classes. After the encounter Sam and Yash nicknamed the girl Jordan – as in Jordan Baker, the woman who cheats at gold in the 1925 novel. The three of them become a trio of sorts. King also gives the girl a previous boyfriend called Jay.  Sam and the girl are the couple but he is abstinent for surprisingly earnest religious reasons so their sex life consists of what she calls “everything but” . But this does not stop the two of them from being attracted to each other but it is also notable that she prefers Yash’s cooking to Sam’s and possibly even his company. She quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. 

The boys live in Breach House, named after DH Lawrence’s childhood home, which is another nod to love triangles. (The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover).

After Sam and the narrator break up, she is upset that this may also mean losing her friendship with Yash.

“I’m aware that I have ideas about the future that I hadn’t discussed with myself”. Sometime later,  she and Sam go on what must be one of the most achingly sexy non-dates in contemporary fiction before they become a couple.

Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the centre of a charged intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choice made will alter these three lives forever.

Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behjnd and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.

Lily King’s superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics equally adore. Heart the Lover is a deeply moving story that celebrates love, friendship, and transformative nature of forgiveness. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & lovers, provers Lilly King is a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelist at work today.

Heart the Lover by Lily King, Canongate £18.99/Grove Atlantic $28, 256 pages.