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book details / updated June 22, 2026

Great Big Beautiful Life: Reese's Book Club

by Emily Henry

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This is Henry pivoting away from straight rom-com: two writers competing to ghostwrite a reclusive heiress's memoir, with the "real" story unfolding in pieces neither of them can fully trust. It's plottier and more structurally ambitious than her earlier books, closer to upmarket fiction than beach read.

Cover of Great Big Beautiful Life: Reese's Book Club by Emily Henry.

why track this in moth

The dual-timeline structure (Margaret's past chapters interleaved with the present) is the kind of book where notes genuinely help. Moth lets you track which version of Margaret's story you're currently reading.

Book facts

Genre
Literature & Fiction, Dramas & Plays, Comedy, Genre Fiction, Feel-Good, Women's Fiction
Publisher
Penguin Group
Published
April 22, 2025
Pages
432
Reading time
8 hr 35 min · ~21 nights at 25 min/day in Moth
ISBN
9780593441299
Language
en

Publisher's summary

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK ∙ AN INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ∙ Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping novel from Emily Henry.

As featured in The New York Times ∙ Rolling Stone ∙ People ∙ Good Morning America ∙ NPR ∙ Vogue ∙ The Los Angeles Times ∙ The Cut ∙ USA Today ∙ Cosmopolitan ∙ Harper's Bazaar ∙ Marie Claire ∙ Glamour ∙ ELLE ∙ E! Online ∙ The New York Post ∙ Bustle ∙ Reader's Digest ∙ BBC ∙ PopSugar ∙ SheReads ∙ Paste ∙ and more!

Alice Scott is an eternal optimist still dreaming of her big writing break. Hayden Anderson is a Pulitzer-prize winning human thundercloud. And they’re both on balmy Little Crescent Island for the same reason: to write the biography of a woman no one has seen in years, or at least to meet with the octogenarian who claims to be the Margaret Ives. Tragic heiress, former tabloid princess, and daughter of one of the most storied (and scandalous) families of the twentieth century.

When Margaret invites them both for a one-month trial period, after which she’ll choose the person who’ll tell her story, there are three things keeping Alice’s head in the game.

One: Alice genuinely likes people, which means people usually like Alice, and she has a whole month to win the legendary woman over.

Two: She’s ready for this job and the chance to impress her perennially unimpressed family with a Serious Publication.

Three: Hayden Anderson, who should have no reason to be concerned about losing this book, is glowering at her in a shaken-to-the core way that suggests he sees her as competition.

But the problem is, Margaret is only giving each of them pieces of her story. Pieces they can’t swap to put together because of an ironclad NDA and an inconvenient yearning pulsing between them every time they’re in the same room.

And it’s becoming abundantly clear that their story, just like the tale Margaret’s spinning, could be a mystery, tragedy, or love ballad . . . depending on who’s telling it.

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