“Travel writer Poppy Wright and her best friend Alex Nilsen have taken one summer trip together every year for ten years. Two years ago the trip ended badly and they have not spoken since.”
What's in this book
- Emily Henry's 2021 contemporary romance — travel writer Poppy and best friend Alex have one summer trip a year
- New York Times bestseller; the literary commercial breakout that established Henry as the canonical contemporary romance novelist
- 364 pages cross-cutting a present-tense Palm Springs trip with ten earlier summer trips",
- Author also wrote Beach Read (2020), Book Lovers (2022), Happy Place (2023), and Funny Story (2024)
- Julia Whelan audiobook is the definitive audio production
- For readers of Beach Read, Tomorrow x3, and contemporary American literary commercial romance
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People We Meet on Vacation is Emily Henry's 2021 second adult romance novel, the New York Times bestseller and the literary commercial breakout that established Henry as the canonical contemporary American literary romance novelist. The structural premise is the ten-year friendship-into-tension between Poppy Wright (a travel writer for a New York adventure-luxury magazine, extroverted, professionally happy) and Alex Nilsen (Poppy's college best friend, an Indiana English teacher, quiet, structurally unhappy in ways he has not figured out how to name). For ten years Poppy and Alex have taken one summer trip together each year (the structural device of the novel — each chapter alternates between a present-tense Palm Springs trip and one of the ten earlier summer trips). The novel opens two years after their last trip, which ended badly and after which they stopped speaking.
Henry's structural method is the cross-cutting between the present-tense Palm Springs trip and the ten earlier summer trips, with the actual events of the rupture two years earlier revealed slowly across the back third. The travel-writing material is rendered with the kind of patient procedural texture (the Air-bnb-hunting, the freelance-writing-deadline anxiety, the actual mechanics of paying for a New York apartment on a travel-writer's income) that lifts the novel above its commercial-romance shelf. The Sarah Torres subplot (Alex's eventual fiancee who appears in two of the earlier trip chapters) is the structural counterpoint that makes the actual stakes of the Poppy-Alex friendship clear. The Alex Nilsen depression material is handled with the moral seriousness that the actual subject requires and lifts the novel above what the broader contemporary romance market typically commits to.
Recommended as the canonical contemporary American literary commercial romance, as the right Henry entry point alongside Beach Read (2020), and for fans of Casey McQuiston's Red, White, and Royal Blue, Christina Lauren's romance work, and the broader literary-romance subgenre. Read Book Lovers (2022), Happy Place (2023), Funny Story (2024), and Great Big Beautiful Life (2025) next. The Julia Whelan audiobook is the definitive audio production. Four solid stars.
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