January Andrews

January Andrews is the romance novelist protagonist of Emily Henry's debut novel Beach Read — a writer who has made her career writing happy, optimistic love stories and who arrives at her late father's lake house, shaken by revelations about his secret life, and finds she can no longer write the kind of endings she used to believe in. Her arrangement with her neighbor and literary fiction author Gus Everett — they will each write in the other's genre for the summer — forces her to confront what she actually believes about love and happiness.

Henry writes January with the warmth and wit that defines her fiction — self-deprecating, funny, emotionally intelligent in her writing even when she's a mess in her life, and the kind of person whose genuine love for her genre makes her defensiveness about it both understandable and touching. Her father's death and the secret it revealed have shattered a foundational belief about the nature of love, and the novel is about rebuilding something more honest.

Beach Read announced Henry as one of contemporary romance's most significant new voices and established the warmly literary register that characterizes all her subsequent work. The novel's engagement with the serious/popular fiction divide is affectionate and sharp simultaneously.

Begin with Beach Read (2020).