Emily Henry

Beach Read works against its own title: two novelists with writer's block, one literary and one romance, agree to swap genres for a summer. Henry had been publishing young adult fiction for years before it, and that 2020 switch to adult romance turned her into one of the most dependable bestsellers in the category.

People We Meet on Vacation, Book Lovers and Happy Place followed. Everything runs on banter and on characters who can describe their own damage fluently without that being the same thing as understanding it. Henry usually lets the distance between those two states carry the plot.