One thing about me is I’m always going to read a new Emily Henry. I read this one (as I did all the others) with my ears, because it’s narrated by Julia Whelan and I love her narration almost as much as I love EmHen’s books.

Okay, so this one is about Alice, perky journalist who mainly writes about celebrities and pop culture, but also enjoys a spot of ghost writing for famous people. She’s tracked down the motherlode of celebrity: Margaret Ives, the elusive heiress who’s experienced more wealth, fame and tragedy in her life than a whole palace full of royals. She’s excited to get started with the interviews, and to find out more about who Margaret is and why she disappeared.

But - you’d never have guessed - there’s a complication. Margaret has brought in another writer, and she wants them both to pitch for the work. And this other writer? Pulitzer Prize winner. And a very attractive (if moody and brooding) man, at that.

Great Big Beautiful Life, by Emily Henry. Penguin, 2025

This is where it’d be easy to write off these books. “it’s so predictable! Of course they’re going to fall in love! Why would you bother reading when you know what’s going to happen?!” People are super snitty about romance books. They’re pigeon-holed as “women’s fiction”, boiled down to tropes and types and pink cartoonised covers; ridiculed and barely reviewed. They’re somehow lesser. Not like the great works of fiction. Not literary.

But my guy, I hate to be the one to remind you, LIFE is predictable. We’re born, we grow, we fall in and out and in to love, and one day, hopefully a long long time away and peacefully in bed, we die. Life is the ultimate in predictability. What makes it interesting, captivating, what makes it fun, is the stuff that happens all around the predictability. The places we go, the sunrises we see, the coffees we drink, the people we love. The endless variations in the colours of life are the reason why we are not mere bots following some inescapable path of taxes and drudgery.

So yes, person 1 meets person 2, they are attracted to one another, life happening all the while with families and careers and travel and bills. There are misunderstandings, oh no it can never work, ahh! here is the happy ending : could be the most boring novel material. Or - in its endless incarnations, fractions, variations, colours, travails and joys, it could be the stories of anyone who’s ever lived.

And this is why I will always read Emily Henry novels. And books by Lindsey Kelk, and Helen Hoang; Julia Quinn, Casey McQuiston, Mhairi MacFarlane, Laura Kay, Ali Hazlewood, and any number of other incredible writers who take the most common of human experiences and emotions and spin the plain threads into something gorgeous.

(If they were men writing about a man having life-changing, revelatory experiences; if these were male authors describing the challenges of finding friendships and building your career path while also falling in love and having sex, their books would be Important, and Timely, and Great Novels of Our Time. But we live in a patriarchal society, and women’s experiences and skills are still seen as lesser, so here we are)

Henry’s novels are always set somewhere brilliant. Great Big Beautiful Life is on a wee island in Georgia, which is not somewhere I’ve ever thought about, if I’m honest. Now I’m packing my bags and will be setting up home in my clapboard seaside cabin - just as soon as I’ve set up my waterfront home in Knott’s Harbor, Maine (Happy Place), sat on my lakefront porch in Michigan for a few months (Beach Read), and drunk coffee in Sunshine Falls, North Carolina (Book Lovers).

As with all her other books, Great Big Beautiful Life is about so much more than just the love story. Alice and Hayden have to reckon with their own complicated families, their career ambitions, and the challenge of working out who they are and want to be. While there is a happy ending (not a spoiler - there has to be, or the die-hard romance readers would actually riot, and the book cover wouldn’t be all orange-sunsetty if they all died via nihilistic disaster), it’s not all sunshine and puppies tied up in a bow. People get hurt, and experience consequences for their actions, and compromises have to be made.

Just like in real life.

So if you’re looking for me, you’ll probably find me curled up on a porch somewhere, watching the sun on the water, drinking coffee, and falling in love with people falling in love.