India, May 29 -- The multi-award-winning American novelist Lily King (63), who was nominated for the 2026 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, is also on the shortlist of this year's Women's Prize for Fiction for her sixth novel, Heart the Lover. The title is billed as both a prequel and a sequel to her earlier bestselling novel, Writers & Lovers. It functions well independently too and its luminous prose and gender politics compel you to read it in a single sitting.

King notes that she was raging against the Trump administration and thinking that a literary response would be fitting when she began writing a "political murder mystery". But while she was working on it, in 2019, she lost "two dear old friends . a month apart". The coronavirus p...