NEW YORK, April 23, 2024 — Emily Henry has spent five books quietly rewriting what a commercial romance novel is allowed to do, and today, with the publication of FUNNY STORY from Berkley, the case for her position at the top of her genre becomes impossible to dispute. Every one of her four previous novels has been a #1 New York Times bestseller. Every one of them has crossed decisively into the readership that literary fiction has spent years pretending was smaller than it is. Every one of them has been the summer’s most talked-about romance among book clubs, bookstagram, and the enormous, quietly powerful audience of readers who buy contemporary romance and who have been telling their friends for four books running that Emily Henry is different.

FUNNY STORY is the novel in which the difference becomes definitive. It is her sharpest book. It is her most character-driven book. It is her funniest book, which is saying something. And it is, on the evidence of the pre-publication response, the book that will move her from the top of her genre to a place occupied, in living memory, by very few writers of contemporary romance: the writer whose new release is a mainstream cultural event on the day it publishes.

What the Book Is

Daphne Vincent has moved to a small town in northern Michigan for her fiancé Peter, a man she has built her life around. Days before the wedding, Peter announces that he is in love with his childhood best friend Petra. Daphne is left without a partner, without a wedding, without a plan, and, most awkwardly, without anywhere to live. She takes the only room she can find on short notice: the spare room in the apartment of Petra’s ex-boyfriend Miles Nowak, a man whose life has just been imploded by the same announcement that imploded hers.

What follows is Henry doing what only Henry does. Two wounded, self-aware, funny people are put in immediate physical proximity under absurd conditions. Neither of them has the emotional bandwidth to date anyone. Both of them, gradually and against their better judgment, begin to notice that the person they are living with is easier to be around than the person they were supposed to marry. What Henry adds, on top of the classic setup, is a summer’s worth of children’s librarian’s work in a small tourist town, a whiskey-fueled evening that becomes the novel’s most quoted scene, a family reunion that requires them to pretend they are dating for reasons the novel takes its time explaining, and a supporting cast that Henry has become better at building than almost anyone in her genre.

Why Henry Works

The reflexive dismissal of commercial romance in prestige literary conversation is one of the most tired and least interesting habits of American book criticism. Contemporary romance is one of the largest and most vital reading communities in the country. Its readers are among the most engaged, most literate, and most active in the book economy. Its best writers are working at a level of craft that most literary novelists would benefit from studying. Emily Henry is, by any honest measure, one of those writers.

What Henry does that most of her contemporaries in commercial romance do not: she writes real jobs, real emotional interiority, real grief, and real humor. Her protagonists are, without exception, women in their late twenties or early thirties with actual professions the novel treats with respect (a wedding planner in BEACH READ, a literary agent in BOOK LOVERS, a children’s librarian in FUNNY STORY). Her love interests are not fantasy men. They are recognizable human beings with specific baggage and specific competence. Her banter is not filler. It is the primary vehicle by which her characters, and her readers, learn who these people are.

The result, in book after book, is a romance novel that satisfies the deep pleasure the genre exists to satisfy (two people find each other) while also delivering the incidental pleasures that literary fiction has often, foolishly, assumed romance could not provide. This is why Henry’s readership is larger, and more crossover-inclined, than any other contemporary romance novelist working. She has been building it, book by book, on the promise that the reader will get a real novel and a real romance in the same package.

Why It Matters

The commercial performance of FUNNY STORY, which is already tracking as Henry’s biggest launch to date, is not incidental to the argument. Henry is now demonstrably one of the most commercially significant novelists working in American publishing across any genre. That fact is not, on its own, a literary judgment. What is a literary judgment, and what the Tribune is prepared to make: Emily Henry has, over five novels, quietly become the most important American contemporary romance novelist of her generation, and the writer who has done the most to expand what the genre is capable of holding.

FUNNY STORY is her most complete book. Readers who have followed her since BEACH READ will finish it and feel confirmed. Readers who are new to Henry, and who have been suspicious of the surrounding enthusiasm, will find in it the demonstration that the enthusiasm was earned. Readers who have never read contemporary romance at all, and who are considering starting somewhere, could not choose a better starting point.

This is the summer’s essential romance, and the book that makes Emily Henry’s place in her category impossible to argue with any longer.

FUNNY STORY by Emily Henry is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook wherever books are sold. Published by Berkley.

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