People We Meet on Vacation by Emily Henry (best story books to read .TXT) 📕

A huge thank-you also to Jessica Mangicaro, Dache Rogers, and Danielle Keir. Without you, I’m not convinced anyone would even read this book, so thank you for using your talent and passion to advocate for my books. You make everything brighter.

Thank you also to everyone else at Berkley for creating such a warm, supportive home for me and my books, including but not limited to Claire Zion, Cindy Hwang, Lindsey Tulloch, Sheila Moody, Andrea Monagle, Jessica McDonnell, Anthony Ramondo, Sandra Chiu, Jeanne-Marie Hudson, Craig Burke, Christine Ball, and Ivan Held. I feel so lucky every day to be working with you.

To my amazing agent, Taylor Haggerty, as well as to everyone else on the phenomenal Root Literary team—Holly Root, Melanie Figueroa, Molly O’Neill—thank you for being so involved, dedicated, and kind. And perhaps most importantly, thanks for the sparkling rosé.

Thank you also to Lana Popović Harper, Liz Tingue, and Marissa Grossman for being such a huge support to me from the very beginning.

My dear friends Brittany Cavallaro, Jeff Zentner, Riley Redgate, Bethany Morrow, Kerry Kletter, David Arnold, Justin Reynolds, Adriana Mather, Candice Montgomery, Eric Smith, Tehlor Kay Mejia, Anna Breslaw, Dahlia Adler, Jennifer Niven, Kimberly Jones, and Isabel Ibañez have been making my life (and writing) better for years, and I can’t thank them enough.

To have the support of members of the book community and writers I so admire has been not only hugely meaningful to me on a personal level, but is largely the reason I’m still able to do this job I love so much. Special thanks to Siobhán Jones and the entire Book of the Month team, as well as Ashley Spivey, Zibby Owens, Robin Kall, Vilma Iris, Sarah True, Christina Lauren, Jasmine Guillory, Sally Thorne, Julia Whelan, Amy Reichert, Heather Cocks, Jessica Morgan, and Sarah MacLean. Your kindness and encouragement have been so important in my journey.

And as always, thank you to my family, for raising me to be both pretty weird and weirdly confident, and to my husband, for always stopping to kiss my head on the way to the kitchen. You are the best, and no one could deserve you.

READERS GUIDE

People We Meet on Vacation

EMILY HENRY

Behind the Book

Every time I start to watch When Harry Met Sally . . . , it feels like the first time. Not because I don’t remember every iconic scene in Nora Ephron’s rom-com masterpiece—I do.

But because I hate Harry. Every time. I catch myself thinking, however briefly, I don’t remember him being this awful! Or Sally really carries this movie. During their first scenes together, I find cynical, horny Harry almost unbearable. But then Ephron works her magic, and everything changes. A softer Harry emerges, the true Harry, a Harry capable of great love and tenderness, one who only needed some time to grow up and to grow on Sally, and you.

And together, over the course of minutes and years, Sally and I fall in love with the last person we expected to.

When I started People We Meet on Vacation, I didn’t set out to write a homage to one of my favorite romantic comedies. But perhaps it was Ephron who left this indelible mark on me, planted a seed of ardent appreciation for characters who grate and irritate and infuriate, until the moment they suddenly don’t. Not only because they’ve changed, but because you’ve begun to see the full picture of who they are.

And that was what I set out to write in this book. Two characters with no obvious reason to like each other, let alone love each other. Two people with so little in common that romance never seemed to be on the table, and thus friendship could blossom. That once-in-a-lifetime kind of true, bone-deep, unconditional friendship that becomes such a part of your DNA that you could never feel quite like yourself again without it. Alex and Poppy, Poppy and Alex.

On the surface, of course, this is a book about vacations, written in a time before COVID-19, when weekends away and transcontinental flights felt much more within reach than they do these days. But as with Harry—and with Alex—the surface image of a thing is rarely the truth, at least not all of it.

This is, ultimately, a book about home. About finding it, about staying in it, about wrapping your arms tightly around it and breathing it in until it fills up your lungs. It’s about a world built for two, the magical Venn diagram formed by a special friendship: You, Me, and the sacred overlap called Us.

So, while we might not all be able to hop on an airplane or stuff ourselves into a Greyhound seat, scour Groupon for discounted country-music-themed motels and questionably safe water taxi services, I hope this book carries you somewhere magical. I hope it lets you feel ocean breezes in your hair and smell spilled beer on a karaoke bar’s floor. And then I hope it brings you back. That it brings you home, and fills you with ferocious gratitude for the people you love.

Because, really, it’s less about the places we go than the people we meet along the way. But most of all, it’s about the ones who stay, who become home.

Discussion Questions

When they first meet, Alex and Poppy are immediately put off by each other. Have you ever made a friend after a bad first impression?

What’s something you do on vacation that you’re unlikely to do in your daily life? Is there a certain comfort in anonymity?

Have you ever met a goal and found that your reaction wasn’t quite what you expected?

What is your worst vacation memory? Your best?

Poppy is going through professional burnout. Have you ever experienced that kind of fatigue? How did you get through it?

Which vacation of Alex and Poppy’s