❤️Heart the Lover: Book Review and List of Literary References (Without Spoilers)
Heart the Lover by Lily King is an unputdownable 5-star novel peppered with literary references so good I read it twice--just like Rory Gilmore would.
Heart the Lover by Lily King was my book of the year. And with its abundance of literary references, it’s perfect for all of us “Rory Gilmores.”
Buy on: Amazon | Target | Bookshop.org | Barnes & Noble
Quick Details
Genre: literary fiction with first love, a love triangle, and family drama, coming of age
Themes: forgiveness, personal growth
Pages: 256
Publisher: Grove Press
Age Rating: 18+
Spice Level: some open-door romance
Triggers?: yes1
Recommended for: readers like Rory Gilmore
Plot Summary
Heart the Lover begins:
“You knew I’d write a book about you someday.”
Yes, our protagonist is a writer. For most of the book, we know her as Jordan, a nickname given to her (from the book, The Great Gatsby) by her male 17th Century Lit classmates, Sam and Yash.
Together, the three talk literature, play cards (this is where we get the title Heart the Lover), and venture from friends to lovers. This triangle, and the pivotal choices related to it, change everything.
Part two transports the reader several years into the future, where we catch up with the characters and learn more about how these decisions altered the trajectories of their lives.
In part three, the tensions and secrets of the past come to a head as they collide with life-or-death situations in the present.
My Review
I’ve been a fan of Lily King’s writing, particularly the Read With Jenna pick Writers & Lovers (which so astutely captured new adulthood), for a long time, but Heart the Lover is, by far, my favorite, and will be my book of the year.
When I picked Heart the Lover up, I couldn’t put it down. Seriously, I walked around with my head in the book until I finished it in just one afternoon. It’s that kind of book.
And while I usually have a lot to say about a book I loved so much, this time I don’t, and here’s the reason: Heart the Lover is a book about feeling, not thinking. It’s both heartbreaking and breathtaking. And it’s your immersion in the story that matters.
Also, discussing this book in detail would require many spoilers.
So, without saying too much, know that it does also make a good book club pick with a lot to debate about the characters’ decisions—kind of like Gilmore Girls. (Why did Rory drop out of Yale?!) And, you can play the card game from the book at your meeting!
The Bottom Line: Read it if you want to read the “it” book of fall 2025, and do so during one cozy autumn day, on which you have a few hours to both start and finish it (2-3 hours).
More From Lily King
If you’re looking to dive deeper into Lily King’s work, here are my thoughts:
Tip: One thing that blew my mind about Heart the Lover was discovering its connection to Writers & Lovers. So, yes, they make a great pairing (read either one first):
Heart the Lover’s Book and Author List
I love me a book list! Here, I counted 76 separate literary references in Heart the Lover (though some are mentioned more than once). So many literary references overlapped with the books from Gilmore Girls in our Rory Gilmore Reading Challenge, so I cataloged them for you.
📖 Means it was also on Gilmore Girls
My full Heart the Lover book and author list, in order of appearance:
Francis Bacon – essay History of Life and Death
Lord Byron – Cromwell
Izaak Walton – The Compleat Angler
Geoffrey Chaucer 📖
John Milton 📖
F. Scott Fitzgerald – The Great Gatsby2 📖
Victor Hugo 📖
James Joyce 📖
James Joyce – Finnegan’s Wake 📖
Saint Augustine of Hippo – Confessions of Saint Augustine
C. S. Lewis – Mere Christianity
D. H. Lawrence 📖
William Shakespeare – Hamlet 📖
Marcus Tullius Cicero – De Fato / letters to Brutus
Quintus Horatius Flaccus – Horace
Walt Whitman 📖
Dante Alighieri – The Inferno 📖
Ray Hart – The Last Fall
Publius Ovidius Naso
Ovid – ‘Iphis and Ianthe’ from Metamorphoses
David Hume 📖
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Immanuel Kant
Algernon Charles Swinburne
Henry James – The Golden Bowl
Henry James 📖
Constance Fenimore Woolson
Miguel de Cervantes – Don Quixote 📖
Karl Marx 📖
Sophocles – Oedipus
William Shakespeare – Macbeth 📖
Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment3
Aristotle
Eleanor H. Porter – Pollyanna
Knut Hamsun – Hunger
Virgil – The Aeneid
W. B. Yeats 📖
W. H. Auden
Marcel Proust 📖
Albert Camus
Virginia Woolf 📖
Katherine Mansfield
Zora Neale Hurston
Elizabeth Bowen
Djuna Barnes
Nadine Gordimer
Jamaica Kincaid
Anton Chekhov
Samuel Beckett 📖
William Faulkner 📖
Elizabeth Bowen - A House in Paris
Ezra Pound
James Joyce – Ulysses 📖
Henry Miller 📖
Anaïs Nin 📖
Franz Kafka 📖
Marcel Proust - La Recherche
Marcel Proust - Swann’s Way 📖
Thomas Mann 📖
Thomas Mann – The Magic Mountain4 📖
Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace 📖
Homer – The Iliad 📖
Ernest Hemingway – The Sun Also Rises 📖
Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary 📖
William Faulkner - As I Lay Dying 📖
William Shakespeare 📖
Dylan Thomas 📖
Louis-Ferdinand Céline – Journey to the End of the Night
Ralph Ellison – The Invisible Man
William Shakespeare - Julius Caesar5 📖
Winston Churchill 📖
William Shakespeare - Othello 📖
Leo Tolstoy - Anna Karenina 📖
Halldór Laxness – Independent People
Flannery O’Connor
Ernest Hemingway 📖
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I’m not identifying the triggers because they can spoil the narrative.
Daisy Buchanan and Jordan Baker are characters.
The reference is to the protagonist Rodion Romanovich Raskolnikov.
There is also a reference to the character Hans Castorp.
The reference is “Et tu, Brute?”
Do we think # 18 The Last Fall by Ray Hart is real though because If so, I really want to read it!
Sounds like the perfect book for the upcoming cool fall days. All the literary references sound interesting!