People We Meet on Vacation

Emily Henry's People We Meet on Vacation, published on 11 May 2021 by Berkley Books, follows two friends who have almost nothing in common. Poppy Wright is outgoing, restless and full of wanderlust, and works as a travel writer for a magazine; Alex Nilsen is mild-mannered and introverted and would rather stay at home with a book. They became friends at college and, for ten summers, took a single week of holiday together while living in different cities, until a trip to Dubrovnik ended the arrangement and left the two of them not speaking for two years. Poppy has since been living what looks like her dream job, writing travel pieces for the magazine she works for.

The novel is told out of order, interspersing the present holiday with flashbacks to the trips that came before it. Poppy, stuck in a rut in her life and career, realises that the last time she was genuinely happy was on that final trip with Alex, so she asks him for one more week away together and plans to use it to put right what went wrong. He agrees, and the two of them set off again.

The novel was published as You and Me on Vacation in the United Kingdom and Australia.