The Books That Take Us Back

“You know how you can remember exactly when and where you read certain books? A great novel, a truly great one, not only captures a particular fictional experience, it alters and intensifies the way you experience your own life while you’re reading it. And it preserves it, like a time capsule.” ~Lily King, Heart the Lover

If you’re new here, you may not know that I spent nearly a decade working in book publishing at Penguin Random House. And while I absolutely love what I do now (or else I wouldn’t be here, writing this), I’ll admit: if I weren’t running Rescripted, I’d probably still be there, talking books, trading early galleys over coffee, and selling stories that linger long after the cover is closed.

This past weekend, I finished Heart the Lover, and it was the first time in a while that a book truly captivated me — that unputdownable kind of read that swallows whole afternoons. I was instantly transported back to my early twenties, when my relationship at the time felt like the only thing that mattered.

Reading it felt like walking down memory lanes I didn’t know were still paved. The narrator (unnamed until the end) meets two brilliant classmates, Sam and Yash, in her senior year of college. They call her “Jordan,” invite her into their electric world of late-night card games and 17th-century lit debates, and the triangle ignites.

What stayed with me was how our younger selves make decisions that ripple across decades. Jordan dates Sam but falls for Yash; years pass, she becomes a writer and a mother, and the past comes roaring back. The heartbreak, the longing, the what-ifs, they all remind us that who we were quietly shapes who we become. 

The Guardian called the novel “a long, tender farewell to youth,” and I can’t think of a better description. Because that’s the thing about getting older: our choices shape our fate, yes, but two things can be true at once. We can move forward and still feel the tug of the selves we used to be.