Happy Place

LoveReading Says

Our heroine Harriet has been excited to escape her post-break-up lonely flat and gruelling job as a trainee surgeon to reunite with her best friends in their favourite holiday spot – but when she arrives, she discovers that her ex is there too. Can they keep it a secret to avoid ruining the holiday – or will they discover their friends have their own secrets too? 

Emily Henry is up there with the best romantic comedy authors writing today, and Happy Place is an absolute classic of her feel-good novels. Any novel by Emily Henry is going to be great, and this is no exception. As a book nerd, my personal favorites of hers are still the publishing-themed pair Book Lovers and Beach Read – whereas this feels more like the spiritual companion novel to You and Me on Vacation.

Harriet is a brilliantly realised avoidant people-pleaser, a flawed yet admirable heroine we can all relate to and aspire to be more like. I didn’t know before reading this that the perfect man is an artisanal carpenter with curly hair and an inferiority complex who smokes weed with his mum – but now it seems obvious that of course he is.

It’s delightful to read a couple as obsessed with each other as Harriet and Wyn – constantly aware of each other’s bodies and thoughts, both soulmates and hurt enemies, trying angrily to make the other as horny as they are. Lovely stuff. My favourite moments were their ‘past’ dialogue – exemplary examples of the kind of impossibly fervent, devoted, nostalgic yet playful conversations that you read romances for. In fact, my only reservation with this book is that I can’t believe that anyone shortens the name ‘Harriet’ to ‘Har’ (am I wrong?). 

A summer holiday in a book. 

Billy Lindon

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