"Heart the Lover" by Lily King

An audio book.

Jordan is a female student - she's started as a golf scholar and she's now doing Creative Writing. Her brother's gay. Carson (female) is her flatmate. Her ex-flatmate had been murdered.

She goes out with Sam, a sex-abstainer until he relents. They soon break up. She extends her degree by a year, not least because she'll then share time with Yash, Sam's flatmate. They start sleeping together. Yash's father is against it. Jordan goes to work in Paris for a while. Yash joins her for a few weeks then returns home.

He visits her several years later. He's single, a lawyer. She's married with 2 boys - 5 and 7. She's published books that he's read. She had his child, a daughter, who she gave away an hour after birth. Does he know this? No, though Silas does. Why did he visit?

5 years later, her eldest son Jack needs a dangerous brain operation. She's not written a book in 5 years. Josh is terminally ill. She flies to him. Sam is at his bedside. Jash tells her he'd been in remission when he visited her. She tells him that he has a 27 y.o. daughter somewhere. Why did he run off? He says he panicked, that they'd been too poor to marry. Jack's suddenly offered an op. She delays her trip to him because of Jash. On the way to the airport she hears that Jash has died.

I didn't see much in it. I felt manipulated by student love and disappointment, an unplanned pregancy, an ex-lover's terminal illness, a son's critical illness, deathbed regrets, etc.

Other reviews

• Rebecca Wait (The university experience is a risky business in fiction. Generally, the feelings are intense, but the stakes are low; it’s all very formative for the individual character, but it can feel a bit trivial to anyone else.)
• readingwritingandme (The book suffers on a number of levels. There's a general lack of deftness that is incredibly surprising from King. The book feels clunky in the way it draws its characters and lays out the plot. There's nothing to grasp onto in these people, no subtle nuance. ... It is all incredibly surface. From the relationships to the layout of the story, there's a thinness here that doesn't work in the moment or upon reflection. ... Yash's terminal illness is less a plot point than a device to try to save a floundering, confused storyline.)