Great Big Beautiful Life
Emily Henry, 2025
A warm, funny novel about love, storytelling, and the versions of ourselves we offer other people—for anyone who has ever overthought being cool.
Feels like tenderness, longing and humor. About love, art and identity.
A page from the book
The compliment that sounds like an insult until it isn’t.
I think you live in a world that’s more interesting than the one most people live in,” he says, and just as my heart starts to sink with disappointment, with a kind of loneliness, he adds, “and I wish I could live in it too.” I feel myself beaming. “I’ll take you sometime.” “I’d like that,” he says. Emily Henry.Before her adult romances, Emily Henry wrote several YA novels, including The Love That Split the World and A Million Junes.
Books that feel like this
More by Emily Henry
People We Meet on Vacation
Emily Henry, 2021
Two best friends who vacation together every summer have one last trip to fix what went wrong between them—and decide what they are.
Beach Read
Emily Henry, 2020
A romance novelist who has stopped believing in love inherits a lakeside cottage, a literary rival next door, and one summer to write a book she doesn't want to.
Funny Story
Emily Henry, 2024
When her fiancé leaves her for his childhood best friend, a librarian moves in with the other person left behind and tries to rebuild.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- What is Great Big Beautiful Life like?
- Feels like tenderness, longing and humor. About love, art and identity.
- What should I read after Great Big Beautiful Life?
- If you liked Great Big Beautiful Life, try It Happened One Summer (Tessa Bailey), Better Than the Movies (Lynn Painter) and Not in Love (Ali Hazelwood).
A taste of the feed
A mother, a sundress, a stolen base: the anatomy of a kept memory.
All the neighborhood kids played kickball in the street for hours that night, and the adults even joined us for a game. At one point, my mother was high-fiving Michael after stealing home base in her floral sundress and wedge sandals. That moment was pressed in my memories like a yellowed photograph in an antique album.
Better Than the Movies · Lynn Painter
How it feels to be seen as someone’s exact dream.
I’d never felt more beautiful than when he looked at me. Like I was the final prototype of someone’s entire fantasy life.
Not in Love · Ali Hazelwood
How quickly a joke about taking a bullet stops being a joke.
Please don’t cry. I fucking hate it when you cry. It’s like a bullet to my chest.” “Taken many bullets, have you?” My voice is weak, and I hate that. “No,” he husks, “but I would. For you, I would.
Flawless · Elsie Silver
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