Fern Brookbanks

Fern Brookbanks is the protagonist of Emily Henry's novel Meet Me at the Lake — a woman who returns to run her late mother's resort in Muskoka, Ontario, and who crosses paths again with Will Harding, a man she spent a single life-changing day with years ago but never saw again. Henry writes Fern with her characteristic emotional intelligence, making the grief for her mother and the difficult circumstances of her childhood as central to the story as the romance.

Henry's books are distinguished by their attention to how people carry their histories with them into new relationships, and Fern is a particularly well-realized example of this — her complicated feelings about her mother, about the resort and what it represents, and about the choices she made in the years since that day with Will are all woven into the romance rather than kept separate from it.

The Muskoka lake setting is rendered with the sensory specificity of a place Henry knows well, and the resort environment — a place Fern simultaneously loves and is burdened by — gives the novel its central thematic tension between inheritance and choice.

A standalone romance novel from the author of Beach Read and People We Meet on Vacation.