Nora reads the last page of a book first. Libby likes to go in knowing as little as possible. How do you prefer to read?

What was the book that made you fall in love (or fall in love again) with reading?

Would you rather spend a month in Sunshine Falls, or in Nora’s New York life? Why?

Have you ever felt like different places brought out different parts of you?

As Libby and Nora grow, they have to accept that life is carrying them in different directions. Have you ever been through something like that with a friend or family member?

Nora and Libby grew up together, and yet they experienced their childhoods very differently. Why do you think that is? Have you ever had this happen with a family member or friend?

Charlie initially set out to write and wound up editing. Nora wanted to edit and became an agent instead. Have you ever pursued something that led you in a different direction?

As children, Nora and Libby would change the endings of stories if they didn’t like them. If you could change the ending of one book, what would it be and how would you change it?

All of Nora’s exes have ended up with partners who were seemingly totally different than them. Nora and Charlie, however, are peas in a pod. Do your favorite fictional couples tend to fall in one category or the other? Do you feel the same about real-life relationships?

One of Nora’s biggest struggles is finding the balance of how much to compromise in her life for those she loves. What role do you think compromise plays in love? What, to you, is uncompromisable?

What is your idea of a happy ending?

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NORA AND LIBBY’S ULTIMATE READING LIST

Incense and Sensibility by Sonali Dev

The Roughest Draft by Emily Wibberley and Austin Siegemund-Broka

Yinka, Where Is Your Huzband? by Lizzie Damilola Blackburn

Arsenic and Adobo by Mia P. Manansala

A Special Place for Women by Laura Hankin

A Thorn in the Saddle by Rebekah Weatherspoon

Just Last Night by Mhairi McFarlane

An Extraordinary Union by Alyssa Cole

The Editor by Steven Rowley

The Siren by Katherine St. John

A Lot Like Adiós by Alexis Daria

Verity by Colleen Hoover

The Kiss Quotient by Helen Hoang

Portrait of a Scotsman by Evie Dunmore

The Fastest Way to Fall by Denise Williams

So We Meet Again by Suzanne Park

By the Book by Jasmine Guillory

Payback’s A Witch by Lana Harper

A Week to Be Wicked by Tessa Dare

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Keep reading for an exciting look at #1 New York Times bestselling author Emily Henry’s glittering and wise new novel,

HAPPY PLACE

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1

Happy Place

Knott’s Harbor, Maine

A COTTAGE ON the rocky shoreline, with knotty pine floorboards and windows that are nearly always open. The smell of evergreens and brine wafting in on the breeze, and white linen drapes lifting in a lazy dance. The burble of a coffee maker, and that first deep pull of cold ocean air as we step out onto the flagstone patio, steaming mugs in hand.

My friends: willowy, honey-haired Sabrina and wisp of a waif Cleo, with her tiny silver septum piercing and dip-dyed box braids. My two favorite people on the planet since our freshman year at Mattingly College.

It still boggles my mind that we didn’t know each other before that, that a stodgy housing committee in Vermont matched the three of us up. The most important friendships in my life all came down to a decision made by strangers, chance. We used to joke that our living arrangement must be some government-funded experiment. On paper, we made no sense.

Sabrina was a born-and-raised Manhattan heiress whose wardrobe was pure Audrey Hepburn and whose bookshelves were stuffed with Stephen King. Cleo was the painter daughter of a semi-famous music producer and an outright famous essayist. She’d grown up in New Orleans and showed up to Mattingly in paint-splattered overalls and vintage Doc Martens.

And me, a girl from southern Indiana, the daughter of a teacher and a dentist’s receptionist, at Mattingly because the tiny, prestigious liberal arts school gave me the best financial aid, and that was important for a premed student who planned to spend the next decade in school.

By the end of our first night, Sabrina had us lined up on her bed watching Clueless on her laptop and eating a well-balanced mix of popcorn and gummy worms. By the end of the next week, she’d had custom shirts made for us, inspired by our very first inside joke.

Sabrina’s read Virgin Who Can’t Drive.

Mine read Virgin Who CAN Drive.

And Cleo’s read Not a Virgin but Great Driver. We wore them all the time, just never outside the dorm. I loved our musty room in the rambling white-clapboard building. I loved wandering the fields and forest around campus with the two of them, loved that first day of fall when we could do our homework with our windows open, drinking spicy chai or decaf laced with maple syrup and smelling the leaves curling up and dropping from branches. I loved the nude painting of Sabrina and me that Cleo made for her final figure drawing class project, which she’d hung over our door so it was the last thing we saw on our way out to class, and the Polaroids we taped on either side of it, the three of us at parties and picnics and coffee shops in town.

I loved knowing Cleo had been painting whenever her braids were pulled into her neon-green scrunchie and her clothes smelled like turpentine. I loved how Sabrina’s head would tip back on an outright cackle whenever she read something particularly terrifying and she’d kick her Grace Kelly loafers against the foot of her bed. I loved poring over my biology textbooks, running out of highlighter as I went because everything seemed so important, breaking to clean the room top to bottom whenever I got stuck on an assignment.

Eventually, the silence would always crack, and we’d end up giggling giddily over texts from Cleo’s prospective new girlfriend, or outright shrieking as we hid behind our fingers from the slasher movie Sabrina had put on. We were loud. I’d never been loud before. I grew up in a quiet house, where shouting only ever happened when my sister came home with a questionable new piercing or new love interest or both. The shouting always gave way to an even deeper silence after, and so I did my best to head the shouting off at the pass, because I hated the silence, felt every second of it as a kind of dread.