Lily King's Books: A Legacy of Love

During her senior year of college, the narrator meets two rising intellectuals in class, Sam and Yash, and she immediately becomes intertwined in their lives. The boys nickname her Jordan, and they spend their evenings playing games and engaging in banter. From them, she not only finds herself, but the pleasures of youth and those found in friendship.

Years have passed, and Jordan is living the life she has always dreamed of having. The vulnerabilities of her youth seem worlds away—until they’re not. An unexpected visitor pulls her crashing into the past, and she must confront decisions she made all those years ago. 

The first novel from the literary star, The Pleasing Hour, follows an American abroad in Europe as she comes of age and makes difficult decisions. 

Running away from a terrible loss, Rosie decides to work as an au pair to a Parisian family and soon finds the security she’s been missing with Marc and his children.

Nicole, the children’s mother, is the only one unwilling to embrace Rosie into the home. But soon, Nicole must leave again, for the South of France, where she learns that she and Rosie are not as different as she once thought. 

Selected as one of the Best Novels of 2005 by the Chicago Tribune and Publishers Weekly, the story follows a single mom and her 15-year-old son, as the secret she has long since concealed from him comes to light. All alone and pregnant, Vida Avery arrived at the elite Fayer Academy fifteen years ago.

Since then, she has become one of the best teachers the school has ever seen. She lives on campus, with her son, on an island off the New England coast, and has thus managed to keep him and the truth hidden.

But when she accepts the surprise marriage proposal from charming widower Tom Belou, she’ll be forced to go off book. 

Gardener Amory can feel his carefully constructed life giving way: Nixon is impeached, his wife is leaving him, and his traditional beliefs are no longer the majority.

Daley, his daughter, has spent her 11 years navigating the complex relationship between her mother, a forward-thinking liberal, and her father, an old-fashioned conservative who often turns to the bottle.

As Daley grows up, she grows apart from her father and his beliefs, until she must help him rebuild again. In the hopes of getting her father sober, Daley returns home, only to find that their relationship risks destroying everything she has in the present—including the stability she’s found with her new love.

Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction, Euphoria follows three young anthropologists as they join together in the jungle of New Guinea in 1933. 

Among the group is Nell Stone, a charming and famously controversial figure for her work studying South Pacific tribes, her smart and fierce husband Fen, and Andrew Bankson, who crosses paths with the couple and immediately latches on. 

As the days pass, the trio is creating their best work yet, but love, jealousy, and complex dynamics threaten to ruin it all. 

Following her mother’s recent death and the rupture of an intense love affair, Casey Peabody arrives in Massachusetts with little idea of what to do next. She decides to wait tables in Harvard Square, renting out a moldy shoe box, with her days as a golf prodigy far behind her. 

There, she works on a novel she’s been writing for six years, fueled by the belief she can live a creative life, though all her friends have given up on such ambitions long ago. 

And when she becomes entangled in a love triangle with two very different men, her life will only continue to fracture as she tries to find a way to do what she always thought she would in this New York Times bestseller. 

In her first-ever short story collection, King inhabits the voices of various characters, at all ages and points in life, as they navigate heartache, pain, loss, desire, and above all, a constant pull towards love. 

A bookseller confesses his love to his employee, a hurting teenage boy finds unexpected comfort from two college students, and much more.