Only this year, Harriet and Wyn are lying through their teeth while trying not to notice how desperately they still want each other. Their annual respite from the world, where for one vibrant, blissful week they leave behind their daily lives have copious amounts of cheese, wine, and seafood and soak up the salty coastal air with the people who understand them most.

Which is how they find themselves sharing a bedroom at the Maine cottage that has been their friend group’s yearly getaway for the last decade. And still haven’t told their best friends. Except, now-for reasons they’re still not discussing-they don’t. Harriet and Wyn have been the perfect couple since they met in college-they go together like salt and pepper, honey and tea, lobster and rolls. Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2023 by BuzzFeed ∙ Paste Magazine ∙ Elle ∙ Southern Living ∙ SheReads ∙ Culturess ∙ Medium ∙ Her Campus ∙ Readers Digest ∙ Zibby Mag and more!Ī couple who broke up months ago pretend to still be together for their annual weeklong vacation with their best friends in this glittering and wise new novel from #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry. Happy Place is funny at points, but it is also the closest that Henry has come to writing an old-school melodrama, a heart-rending plot that struggles to express the inexpressible.“The beach-read master hooks us again.'- People Henry operates at the top of her - and her readers’ - intelligence, telling sophisticated, heartfelt stories that are conscious of the romantic comedy conventions without being overly meta about them. The novel is structured in flashbacks that detail their initial attraction, their mutual devotion and the sudden, shattering breakup that devastates them both.

The core of the novel is, without question, the ballad of Harriet and her ex-fiancé, Wyn. Admittedly, Sabrina, Cleo and their counterparts don’t come through as sharply as the two leads, their motives mostly a mystery until the final chapters. Most of Henry’s books focus on two characters, but this ensemble piece presents female friendship in all its warmth and woundedness, blessedly absent of misogynist tropes of jealousy and pettiness. It is, in many ways, the least 'happy' of her works, less swooning and more longing, with a sense of melancholy permeating throughout.

Emily henry happy place paperback