Lily King with Jemimah Wei

Kepler’s welcomes New York Times bestselling author Lily King with her intimate new novel of desire, friendship, loss, and the lasting impact of first love.

About the Book

You knew I’d write a book about you someday.

Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and their 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. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon 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, 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 bring the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behind and is forced to 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 story that celebrates love, friendship, and the transformative nature of forgiveness. 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.

Lily King will be in conversation with Jemimah Wei.

About the Speakers

Lily King is the New York Times bestselling author of six novels, including Euphoria and Writers & Lovers, and the story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter. Her work has won numerous prizes and awards, including the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award for Fiction, the Maine Book Award for Fiction, and a Whiting Award. She lives in Portland, Maine. Photo: Eloise King Clements

Jemimah Wei was born and raised in Singapore; she is now based between Singapore and the United States. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University anda Felipe P. De Alba Fellow at Columbia University, where she earned her MFA. A recipient of awards and fellowships from Singapore’s National Arts Council, Sewanee Writers’ Conference, Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference, and Writers in Paradise, she was named one of Narrative’s “30 Below 30”writers and is a Francine Ringold Award forNew Writers honoree. Her fiction has won the William Van Dyke Short Story Prize and appears in Guernica, Narrative, and Nimrod, among other publications. For close to a decade, Wei was a host for various broadcast and digital channels, and she has written and produced short films and travel guides for Laneige, Airbnb, and Nikon. Her first novel, The Original Daughter, was published in 2025. https://jemmawei.com/

Lily King will stay to sign and personalize books after the event.

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