A Slim Novel, A Gut-Punch: Inside Heart The Lover With Lily King
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23 hours ago
Ahead of the Women's Prize winner's announcement this week, C&TH meets Lily King to discuss the yearning, the process, and the strange literary connection she only discovered mid-draft.
Lily King’s Heart the Lover has captured, well, our hearts. At just 250 pages, this slim love story packs an emotional wallop, from college-age yearning to adult nostalgia and could-have-beens. In King’s words, ‘It’s about a college senior who goes on a bad date with a smart guy that changes the rest of her life. The novel explores many different forms of love and the illuminating as well as the shattering effects of the passage of time.’
Named after a playful card game dreamt up by energetically academic college students, Heart the Lover is addictively propulsive, penned in Lily’s signature candid, almost spare style that lays bare the most human emotions without floral arrangement. As in so many of her previous novels, here Lily captures the pain of yearning so aptly – the ache it comes with, the hunger, the thirst.
But in Heart the Lover, Lily seems to have reached a peak – and the Women’s Prize clearly agrees, both longlisting and shortlisting the Massachusetts-born writer in 2026. Is it based on her own youthful yearning? ‘I drew on emotions from my own life but the characters, scenes, and dialogue are fictional,’ Lily says, conceding: ‘I did have to try and reach back to college and how it felt to be that young and unsure what life would hold, and how you have to claw your way into your own future.’
2026 marks Lily King’s first time on the Women’s Prize shortlist.
That clawing and uncertainty ripples through the novel that came before Heart the Lover: Writers and Lovers, published in 2020. And on the final page, an easter egg for Lily fans: all along in Heart the Lover, we’ve been reading the same story, learning the origin story of Casey, the struggling writer/waitress at the centre of Writers & Lovers.
‘I didn’t realise that there was any connection until I was a few scenes in,’ Lily admits. ‘It came to me as such a surprise. I dismissed the idea at first but it persisted and I finally gave in.’
On that Women’s Prize shortlisting (with the winner to be announced on Thursday evening, 11 June): ‘It feels shocking,’ Lily says. ‘Honestly, my first reaction when I was told about the longlist was, “I can’t believe they know my name at the Women’s Prize.” It is such a huge honor to me because as a reader I have tracked that prize since the beginning, and have always discovered new writers from those lists.’
She’s joined by Susan Choi, Addie E. Citchens, Virginia Evans, Marcia Hutchinson and Rozie Kelly on the Women’s Prize shortlist – but regardless of whether she wins, Lily is already working hard on her next novel, which will be ‘set mostly in the 60s’. And inspiration abounds; Lily finds it particularly in ‘reading, driving, running, sleeping, and drinking tea’. Her process? ‘Slow. Plodding. Whiny. I write by hand in a spiral notebook then eventually get it onto the computer, which is the first step in revision. I write many drafts before I show it to my husband, my writers’ group, my agent and editor – in that order.’
Readers will wait even longer – surely more numerous now. Until then, C&TH delved into Lily’s reading life for the latest edition of Shelf Life, where book-lovers tell us about the reads that shaped them. From Judy Blume to Virginia Woolf, you can find her picks below.
Shelf Life: Lily King
This book made me a reader…
The Little Engine That Could. I think it was the first book I read with a plot. I always got so excited waiting to see, over and over, if the little train could make it over the mountain.
This book made me want to be a writer…
It’s Not the End of the World by Judy Blume. I have a memory of being in my bedroom and reading it for the first time and thinking, ‘I want to do this.’
This book was formative in my youth…
Little Women. There’s no question that Jo March was the first writer I ever witnessed get published.
This book is one I can’t stop returning to…
To the Lighthouse, Mrs Dalloway, The Evening of the Holiday, Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, My Name is Lucy Barton. Sorry – can’t choose. Love them all so much. The first three hang out on my desk when I write. I open their pages when I need to remember what a good sentence is.
This book broadened my horizons…
Independent People by Haldor Laxness. Rural Iceland in the early part of the 20th century. What a hard life, and what relentless and exhilarating methods Laxness has to depict it.
This book is my comfort blanket…
I Capture the Castle. Pure joy every time.
I wish I’d written this book…
To the Lighthouse. It’s pure genius, as is Mrs Dalloway. Woolf found the words to capture thought more beautifully than any else ever has.
I can’t stop talking about this book right now…
I have told anyone who will listen about My Friends by Hisham Matar. And everyone who has read it has loved it as much as I did. I don’t often get this kind of 100 percent success rate with my recommendations.
I can’t wait for this book to hit the shelves…
Ann Patchett’s Whistler. It’s perfection.
Heart The Lover by Lily King
Out now.
Canongate Books, Paperback, £9.99
