People We Meet on Vacation

I ate a block of tofu from a stick in Kyoto, and it dripped down my shirt. My husband was bumped by the crowd and nudged me in the back of my shirt with his enormous greasy sausage—also on a stick—and we got the giggles. When you’re traveling with your favorite person, a few stains don’t matter. People We Meet on Vacation is a collection of in-joke travel memories. It’s equal parts hilarious and shockingly tender.

Poppy and Alex are complete opposites. But miraculously, they’re also best friends, and ever since college, they’ve taken an annual summer vacation together. From the scrappy low-budget trips of their early days to the upscale getaways made possible when Poppy lands her dream job at a travel magazine, their friendship has survived it all. Then, something happens in Croatia, and they don’t speak for two years. Now stuck in a rut and desperate to regain her love for travel, Poppy invites homebody Alex on one last trip: a messy shoestring affair, like the old days. Can she mend this rift between them and win back the heart of her best friend—and dream man?

I’m in awe of how well Emily Henry accomplished something so complex: the complete history of a friendship, told across the vacations they shared. You’ll find your heart aching even as you laugh because Poppy struggles to conceal the depth of her wild love for her straight-laced Alex. It’s a decade-long slow-burn, but this one last trip, and its final destination, is worth every little side alley detour.

Poppy and Alex. Alex and Poppy. They have nothing in common. She’s a wild child; he wears khakis. She has insatiable wanderlust; he prefers to stay home with a book. And somehow, ever since a fateful car share home from college many years ago, they are the very best of friends. For most of the year they live far apart—she’s in New York City, and he’s in their small hometown—but every summer, for a decade, they have taken one glorious week of vacation together.

Until two years ago, when they ruined everything. They haven’t spoken since.

Poppy has everything she should want, but she’s stuck in a rut. When someone asks when she was last truly happy, she knows, without a doubt, it was on that ill-fated, final trip with Alex. And so, she decides to convince her best friend to take one more vacation together—lay everything on the table, make it all right. Miraculously, he agrees.

Now she has a week to fix everything. If only she can get around the one big truth that has always stood quietly in the middle of their seemingly perfect relationship. What could possibly go wrong?