Lily King - Harbour Front Literaturfestival

Reading and Discussion

She studies literature and knows how good love stories work: secrets, highs, and lows. But the greatest love story of her life is the one she has experienced herself—and it follows no rules.

In her final year of college, the narrator meets Sam and Yash, two highly gifted students from her seminar on 17th-century literature. The two are living in the house of a professor who is away on a trip; they read, argue, play cards, talk fast, and think even faster. They give her the nickname Jordan and draw her into a world of books, ambition, and wit. Friendship turns into a web of love, desire, and dangerous attraction. What at first seems like the beginning of a carefree adult life becomes an experience whose consequences only become apparent later...

With *Heart King*, Lily King presents a novel about first love, friendship, and the lasting impact of early decisions. At the same time, it is a book about literature itself: about reading as seduction, about language as a game, about conversations in which an entire life seems to unfold. King tells this story with the precision for which she is known: without grand claims, with a keen sense of nuance, of self-deception, and of the humor and vulnerability of human beings.

Lily King, born in 1963, grew up in Massachusetts and now lives in Maine. Her work has received numerous awards. Among her works published in German are “Euphoria” and “Father of the Rain.”