“A master psychological portraitist” (Publishers Weekly) who is “firmly in the top rank of our most accomplished novelists” (Andre Dubus III, author of House of Sand and Fog), Lily King brings deft characterization and emotional precision to stories that illuminate the inner workings of life’s most complicated relationships. The author of six novels and a story collection, her most recent novel, Heart the Lover, was an instant New York Times bestseller, was longlisted for the 2026 Women’s Prize for Fiction and was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.

Called “intensely moving” by NPR and “witty” and “insightful” by The Star Tribune, Heart the Lover was Zadie Smith’s Elle.com Shelf Life pick for “the book that made me weep uncontrollably.” Decades after the end of a passionate college love triangle, the narrator receives a surprise visit and unexpected news that forces her to confront the past and the life choices she’s made. “It stands as one of the most emotionally devastating and soulfully wise novels I have ever read,” wrote Priscilla Gilman in The Boston Globe. “Like all of King’s fiction, Heart The Lover is literary without pretension, emotional without maudlin sentimentality . . .heartrending, swoonily romantic, rigorously clear-sighted.”

“Lily King has written another masterpiece. This book overflows with her brilliance and her heart. We are so lucky.”

—Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author

Writers & Lovers, which shares a narrative thread with Heart the Lover, is an unforgettable portrait of the artist as a young woman. Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody is thirty-one and still clutching on to something nearly all her old friends have let go of: the determination to live a creative life as a novelist. When she falls for two very different men at the same time, Casey’s drive to fulfill her creative ambitions and balance the conflicting demands of art and life is challenged in ways that push her to the brink. Called “wonderful, witty, heartfelt” by The Washington Post, Writers & Lovers was a pick for both The New York Times Book Review’s Group Text and Jenna Bush Hager’s Read With Jenna book club.

“I loved this book not just from the first chapter or the first page but from the first paragraph… The voice is just so honest and riveting and insightful about creativity and life.”

—Curtis Sittenfeld, bestselling author of Romantic Comedy and Prep

King’s first-ever collection of stories, Five Tuesdays in Winter, was praised as “full of insights and pleasures” by Kirkus Reviews in their starred review, was named one of the Best Books of Fall by Vogue and was a finalist for the Story Prize. As The New York Times Book Review raves, “In our time of anxiety and isolation, King writes stories to curl up in, by which I mean they afford us something rarely celebrated in literature: comfort.”

King’s breakout success was the novel Euphoria, set in 1930s Papua New Guinea and loosely based on the life of the anthropologist Margaret Mead and her second and third husbands. A cover review in The New York Times Book Review called it “a taut, witty, fiercely intelligent tale of competing egos and desires in a landscape of exotic menace—a love triangle in extremis.… The steam the book emits is as much intellectual as erotic.” Euphoria won the Kirkus Award for Fiction and the New England Book Award for Fiction and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. It was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2014 by The New York Times Book Review and was included in Time’s Top 10 Fiction Books of 2014 and the Amazon Best Books of 2014. It is in development as a limited series by the BBC.

King is the recipient of a MacDowell Fellowship and a Whiting Writer’s Award. Her short fiction, essays, and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, Vogue, The Los Angeles Review of Books, One Story, The Harvard Review, Ploughshares, Glimmer Train, and several anthologies. She lives with her husband and two daughters in Portland, Maine.

For more information on Lily King, please visit her on Instagram, Twitter, and at lilykingbooks.com.