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book details / updated June 22, 2026

Beach Read

by Emily Henry

more Romance →

This is the Emily Henry book that put "opposites-attract authors swap genres" on the romance map: January's genre-fiction skepticism versus Gus's literary gloom, with a dare-fueled summer forcing them both to write something they wouldn't normally touch.

Cover of Beach Read by Emily Henry.

why track this in moth

Henry's backlist (Funny Story, People We Meet on Vacation, Great Big Beautiful Life) shares this same banter-heavy rom-com DNA; Moth's author and mood tags make it easy to queue up the rest once you're hooked.

Book facts

Genre
Fiction, Romance, Romantic Comedy, Women, Contemporary
Publisher
Penguin
Published
May 19, 2020
Pages
400
Reading time
7 hr 57 min · ~19 nights at 25 min/day in Moth
ISBN
9781984806734
Language
en

Publisher's summary

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.

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