Beach Read

Emily Henry

May 2020 · Sold by Penguin

About this ebook

FROM THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF PEOPLE WE MEET ON VACATION AND BOOK LOVERS!

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.

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.

Ratings and reviews

I truly love the way we slowly learn more about them: their painful past, the hurts in their lives. . One of my fav quotes: “I always like that thought, the way two people really did seem to grow into one. Or at least two overlapping parts, trees with tangled roots.”

Beach Read is my first read by Emily Henry, and it was not what I was expecting, but it did keep me entertained. This story is about two people who meet in college in a writing class; one was infatuated while the other thought they were nemeses. Augustus Everett is an acclaimed author of literary fiction. January Andrews writes bestselling romance. Years later, they find themselves living next door to each other, both suffering from writer's block due to personal issues in their own lives. To help each other with writer's block, they make a bet, a wager of sorts, since they're both broke and need to keep promises made to their agents. However, all bets are off!

I was really disappointed. The concept was good, but it ended up being too cheesy and unrealistic. Really wanted to like this book.

About the author

Emily Henry is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of 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.