Random Hearts is a 1984 novel by American author Warren Adler that was made into a 1999 American motion picture drama and romance.

Vivien Simpson and Edward Davis had never met before, but soon they would be inseparable. Their respective spouses had been carrying on an affair for some time. The affair abruptly ended when their plane to Miami crashes moments after take off. Vivien believed her husband was off to Paris for business. Edward thought his wife was in L.A. Once the bodies are identified, the knowledge they were traveling together is imparted on Vivien and Edward.

They are consumed with curiosity, but no one is alive to answer the most simple of questions; how long it had gone on, where they had met, and why would they lie? All that remains of the love affair is a set of nearly unidentifiable keys. Neither Vivien nor Edward knows what they belong to. More than anything else, they want to know. Compelled by misplaced anger and grief, they center their lives around discovering what their spouses kept from them.

What they ignore most of all is the budding love between the two of them, and perhaps that is what keeps them going. They may have been damaged by their spouses, but they certainly not beyond repair.

Then, suddenly, a man shoots Edward. The man is arrested while Edward is rushed to the hospital. He is promoted to lieutenant just because he got shot. Vivien fails to win the election.

Grief is the undeniable main theme of the novel. It tackles how a person lives from the moment they lose the person most important to them. But they have little room to be sad, as the sense of betrayal is overwhelming.

Typical of most of Adler’s work, love is inescapable. It is the redeeming factor that keeps these two characters from sinking into an abyss.

In 1999, Random Hearts was adapted to into a film of the same name by Sidney Pollack and starring Harrison Ford and Kristin Scott Thomas.

It tells the story of a man and a woman who meet when their loved ones are killed in a plane crash. They find each other's keys in their spouse's possessions and realize that they were having an affair. The story evolves around the relationship between the two survivors.