Writers & Lovers was published in 2020, and Heart the Lover followed in 2025. The protagonist in both is the same woman, known as Jordan in Heart the Lover, and Camila Peabody, or Casey, in Writers & Lovers. Heart the Lover begins with her last year of undergraduate studies, when she meets two fellow students, young men who will become great influences in her life going forward. Heart’s plot wraps around Writers, beginning in college, then picking up a few years after Writers leaves off.

Camila Peabody, known to family and friends as Casey, is in a state of stressful anxiety, in Writers. Living in a barely habitable remodeled potting shed attached to a garage, rented cheaply, and barely all she can afford, Casey works full time waitressing at a tony restaurant adjacent to Harvard. Nearly all her earnings must go to pay off her huge loans, which paid for her undergraduate English degree, and her MFA in creative writing. During the past six years, she has worked on a novel inspired by her mother’s childhood in Cuba. Now, at thirty-one, she struggles to complete the novel, and her mother has mysteriously died while on vacation in Chile. Her mother was her sounding board, her touchstone, her confident.

We learn of her conflicted relationship with her father, who taught her from little on the skills to become highly accomplished aa a golfer, a sport that earns her a free ride to Duke University. Casey abandons the sport, and the financial security, in the aftermath of a tragic revelation. Her mother has also betrayed Casey, but she is able to find more peace, or at least better handle the anger toward her. That is, until her mother’s untimely death.

We learn about the role emotions play in the pursuit to write effective fiction. Repressing strong, traumatic feelings blocks the writer’s ability to reach deeply to the well of creativity, with the writer’s sensitivity being a necessary conduit to truthful storytelling. Casey’s ability to trust romantic partners, to understand her own needs versus the partner’s needs, her female tendency to seek to please, even her ability to read her partner’s intentions, are all hampered by her past experiences. This is a fascinating look behind the curtain of a writer’s process, and the ways experience, trauma, pain, and success all affect that process. Casey is at times frustrating, but the reader with be able to relate to her struggles, and like her enough to route for her.

Meeting the undergrad Jordan in Heart, helps us to understand Casey’s difficulties with relationships, as well as the resulting writer’s block. Sam and Yash are best friends she meets in a seventeenth-century literature class, and she is adopted by them, becoming Sam’s romantic partner, but all three enjoying the chemistry of being together at that special time in life, the carefree years of the joy of study, learning about yourself and relationships, with all the future laid out before you. Choices are made that will have lifelong consequences. It is a time of innocence, of bonding, of trust, and sometimes, of hurt and betrayal. None of us knows how long our life will be, but in our twenties, it feels like nothing and everything is of great consequence, and we will have much time to work it all out. While all three are deeply serious about their literature studies, it is only Jordan/Casey who takes the daring risk of making professional fiction writing her calling, following through on the dream.

I recommend reading the novels in the order in which they were written. I don’t know if Lily King envisioned a two-book series, but it is apparent that Casey’s story was not complete with Writers, and required Heart to round it off, enrich it, and create the context in which bigger questions could be asked. Highly recommend the pair of novels.