Great Big Beautiful Life

Alice Scott writes breezy celebrity profiles and thinks she's found the break of her career. She heads to Little Crescent, a small seaside town in Georgia, to interview Margaret Ives, heiress to a media dynasty who vanished from public life after her husband died.

But Margaret invited someone else too: Hayden Anderson, a Pulitzer-winning biographer, guarded and cynical, the opposite of upbeat Alice. The two are competing for the right to write her life story. Margaret sets up a test. She'll talk to each of them separately for a month, then pick who gets to tell it.

In the interviews, Alice hears the Ives family saga, from the roots of the empire to Margaret's glamorous, tragic marriage to rock star Cosmo Sinclair. Soon she and Hayden suspect the heiress isn't telling them everything. Bound by nondisclosure agreements, the rivals start helping each other without being able to share what they know, and the gap between them shrinks.

Emily Henry blends romantic comedy with family drama, and a good part of the book dives into the Ives family's past.