Reviewed by Wendy Tucker

Heart the Lover
Lily King
Canongate
RRP$32.99

Heart the Lover has been shortlisted for this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction and Lily King will be a guest at the Sydney Writers Festival. King is the bestselling author of six novels and the winner of several literary prizes. She is well known in the US but was, until now, not as established in Australia. I came to this novel with some reluctance, especially when the blurb tells me the narrator is ‘… swept into an intoxicating world of academic fervour, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games’. I believed I was too old to enjoy novels about the formative years of university life, with seminars and lustful crushes. And the frequent comparisons to Normal People didn’t help.

But … I absolutely loved this book. It begins with a moving, witty and always relatable love affair between university students, then the joy of ‘finding your tribe’, of acceptance and making literary references that are both understood and appreciated. And of inventing absurd card games, hence the novel’s title.

Jordan, our narrator, meets Sam and Yash in her senior 17th Century Literature class. These young men are the intellectual stars of the class and have the supreme confidence that Jordan lacks. A friendship begins and the intellectual sparring, the numerous literary references and the overall love and knowledge of literature is an utter delight and magnificently handled by King.

Jordan first has a relationship with Sam, but the real connection is always with Yash who, like Jordan, intends to be a writer. Jordan and Yash are indeed intertwined, however young love is complicated and a previous lover of one is the best friend of the other.

King is exploring the tragedy of a deep connection that comes too young and the bonds of male friendship.

The second half of the book reintroduces us to Jordan and Yash in middle-age. Jordan is a happily married, well respected writer and Yash is an unmarried human rights lawyer. King explores the remnants of the youthful intensity with the acceptance of loss and the relentlessness of time.

I’m not telling the rest of the plot.

Although all the characters are well drawn, totally real and essential to the story, this novel is really a two-hander. It is Jordan and Yash and how decisions made when you are too young to make them can influence the trajectory of your life.

Intelligent, witty and moving. I cried and I hope any reader will.