Some love stories wait decades to be told. Lily King's narrator returns to her final year of college, when two best friends pulled her into their world and into a charged triangle.

Readical Key Points

• Literary novel; an instant New York Times bestseller and a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award and the Women's Prize for Fiction, according to the publisher
• Starred reviews from Kirkus Reviews and Booklist
• Connected to King's earlier novel Writers & Lovers, according to the publisher
• Hardcover, 256 pages, Grove Press (2025)

In her last year of college, the narrator meets Sam and Yash, best friends and standout students in her seventeenth-century literature class, who are living in the house of a professor away on sabbatical. They nickname her Jordan, and through raucous card games, quick talk and shared ambition she finds friendship, romance and a new confidence in her own mind, until she lands inside a three-way attachment. Decades on, an unannounced visit and some unexpected news send her back to the choices she made then.

The novel belongs to literary fiction about first love, friendship and ambition, and readers of Writers & Lovers will find its connecting thread. King sets a campus romance against the longer view of the life that followed it.

About the Author

Lily King has written six novels, including Writers & Lovers and Euphoria, and the story collection Five Tuesdays in Winter, and she is a New York Times bestselling author. According to her publisher, her honors include the Kirkus Prize, the New England Book Award, the Maine Book Award and a Whiting Award, and her books appear in thirty-two languages.

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