Beach Read

FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FUNNY STORY!

A romance writer who no longer believes in love and a literary writer stuck in a rut engage in a summer-long challenge that may just upend everything they believe about happily ever afters.

As featured in The New York Times Book Review ∙ Entertainment Weekly ∙ Oprah Magazine ∙ Betches ∙ Shondaland ∙ Good Morning America ∙ The New York Post ∙ Good Housekeeping ∙ CNN ∙ and more!

Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. When she pens a happily ever after, he kills off his entire cast.

They’re polar opposites.

In fact, the only thing they have in common is that for the next three months, they're living in neighboring beach houses, broke, and bogged down with writer's block.

Until, one hazy evening, one thing leads to another and they strike a deal designed to force them out of their creative ruts: Augustus will spend the summer writing something happy, and January will pen the next Great American Novel. She’ll take him on field trips worthy of any rom-com montage, and he’ll take her to interview surviving members of a backwoods death cult (obviously). Everyone will finish a book and no one will fall in love. Really.

Emily Henry is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Great Big Beautiful Life, Funny Story, Happy Place, Book Lovers, People We Meet on Vacation, and Beach Read. She studied creative writing at Hope College, and now spends most of her time in Cincinnati, Ohio, and the part of Kentucky just beneath it. Find her on Instagram @emilyhenrywrites.

“Once I started Beach Read I legit did not put it down.”—Betches

“Reader, I swooned! Beach Read is a breath of fresh air. My heart ached for January, and Gus is to die for—a steamy, smart and perceptive romance. I was engrossed!”—Josie Silver, #1 New York Times bestselling author of One Day in December

“This is a touching and heartfelt book about love, betrayal, grief, failure, and learning how to love again. I adored going along on Gus and January’s journey, and I closed this book with a satisfied sigh.”—Jasmine Guillory, New York Times bestselling author of The Proposal

“Beach Read is original, sparkling bright, and layered with feeling. Has trying to see the world through your long time crush/rival’s eyes ever been this potent and poignant? If whipcrack banter and foggy sexual tension is your catnip, you’ll adore this book.”—Sally Thorne, USA Today bestselling author of The Hating Game and 99 Percent Mine

“Beach Read is exactly the witty, charming, and swoony novel we always want; it also happens to be the unexpected wallop of emotional wisdom and sly social commentary we need right now. I adored it.”—Julia Whelan, author of My Oxford Year

“[It] has everything the title promises—a romping plot, family secrets, and the thrill of falling in love, all set on the sweeping shores of eastern Lake Michigan. I cannot wait to read what Henry writes next.”—Amy E. Reichert, author The Coincidence of Coconut Cake and The Optimist’s Guide to Letting Go

“Delightfully romantic and slyly poignant, Beach Read is brimming with crackling banter and engrossing prose. It has every flavor of booklover catnip: rivalry, creative struggle, family secrets, and the sweet head-over-heels tumble into love. Emily Henry's Beach Read is 2020's perfect anywhere read.”—Christina Lauren, New York Timesbestselling author of The Unhoneymooners

“If you liked Sally Thorne’s The Hating Game and Linda Holmes’s Evvie Drake Starts Over, you will definitely be into this, which feels like their spawn. (No one asked me to say this, by the way. I’m just high on that happy-sad feeling of finishing a book I enjoyed, that I wish wasn’t over.) Well played.”—Heather Cocks and Jessica Morgan, bestselling authors of The Royal We

“Readers are sure to fall hard for this meta, heartfelt take on the romance genre.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“A heartfelt look at taking second chances, in life and in love.”—Kirkus Reviews

“This will still sweep readers off their feet. January’s first-person narration is suitably poetic and effervescent, the small-town beach setting is charming, and the romance is achingly swoony.”—Booklist

“That Henry can manage to both pack a fierce emotional wallop and spear literary posturing in one go is a testament to her immense skill.”—Entertainment Weekly

Beach Read by Emily Henry is a romantic and emotional story about two writers who are both stuck in life and in their work, and who end up changing each other in unexpected ways. The novel follows January Andrews, a romance novelist who no longer believes in happy endings, and Augustus Everett, a literary fiction writer who has lost his creative spark. Both are dealing with grief, personal disappointment, and the pressure to finish their next books, and both retreat to neighboring beach houses for the summer hoping to recover their inspiration. What begins as annoyance and rivalry slowly turns into understanding, connection, and eventually love.

January has built her career writing cheerful, bestselling romance novels, but her personal life has collapsed. Her father has recently died, and she discovers painful truths about him that make her question everything she believed about her family and about love itself. At the same time, she is struggling financially and emotionally, and she feels unable to write the kind of light, hopeful stories that made her successful. She comes to the beach house in a state of emotional exhaustion, hoping the change of scenery will help her finish a new book while also giving her space to think through her loss.

Augustus, who prefers to be called Gus, is her opposite in many ways. He writes serious, literary fiction with dark themes, and he is quiet, observant, and frustratingly confident. He and January knew each other in college, where their personalities and ambitions clashed. Now, years later, they are neighbors again, and their old tension quickly returns. January assumes Gus is arrogant and emotionally unavailable, while Gus sees January as dismissive of the kind of writing he does. Their conversations are full of challenge, teasing, and hidden vulnerability, and the novel uses their conflict to explore the way people hide pain behind sarcasm, pride, or professional identity.

As the summer continues, January learns that Gus is struggling far more than she first realized. He is also blocked as a writer, but his problem is not just creative. He has a complicated family history, deep resentment, and a tendency to keep people at arm’s length. January’s own emotional wounds begin to surface as well. She has lived with the illusion that her parents had a perfect marriage, only to discover that her father had a long affair and another family. This revelation devastates her because it destroys the story she told herself about love, loyalty, and the people she trusted most. Her heartbreak is not only about losing her father, but about losing her certainty in the idea that people can know each other completely.

In order to challenge one another and escape their writer’s block, January and Gus make a deal to swap genres. January will try to write a serious, literary novel, while Gus will attempt a romance. This arrangement becomes one of the novel’s most enjoyable and revealing parts, because it forces both characters to step outside their assumptions. January begins researching and writing a darker story, which pushes her to examine grief, memory, and family betrayal in a more honest way. Gus, meanwhile, starts exploring romantic storytelling, which allows him to confront emotions he usually avoids. Through this exchange, the book suggests that genre boundaries are more flexible than people think, and that empathy often begins when someone tries to see the world through another person’s artistic lens.

Their creative partnership gradually turns into emotional intimacy. They spend long hours together, talking, drinking, writing, and sharing personal stories. Beneath their banter, they begin to trust each other. January starts to see that Gus’s seriousness hides sensitivity and loneliness, while Gus begins to understand that January’s brightness and humor are ways of protecting herself from pain. Their attraction deepens naturally, but the novel does not treat romance as a simple fantasy. It shows that real closeness requires honesty, and that love is difficult when both people carry fear, unresolved grief, and old disappointments.

The novel also pays attention to January’s mother and the complicated legacy of her father’s choices. January is forced to rethink her childhood memories and her understanding of her parents’ relationship. This emotional conflict gives the story more depth than a simple romance, because it ties January’s present fears to the family patterns that shaped her. She must decide whether she will let betrayal define her view of love forever, or whether she can accept that imperfect people may still be capable of real connection.

Gus has his own emotional reckoning as well. He is not simply the brooding love interest; he is a man who has built his life around distance and self-protection. Through January, he begins to loosen that shell. Their relationship moves from playful hostility to genuine care, and eventually to a deeply felt romance that feels earned because it grows from mutual respect and shared vulnerability. The novel makes their love story feel believable by grounding it in conversations, emotional risk, and the slow dismantling of assumptions.

By the end of Beach Read, both characters have changed. January rediscovers her confidence as a writer and learns that her grief does not have to erase her capacity for joy. Gus learns that vulnerability is not weakness and that letting someone in is not the same as losing control. Their relationship becomes a symbol of the book’s larger message: that healing is possible, creativity can return, and people are not limited to the worst things that have happened to them.

Beach Read is ultimately a story about grief, reinvention, creativity, and the difficult but hopeful process of learning to trust again. It is funny in places, deeply emotional in others, and rooted in the idea that love and art both require honesty. The beach setting gives the novel a sense of escape, but the real journey is internal, as two damaged people slowly learn how to write new stories for themselves.