The small-town rom-com that flips the script — where the big-city career woman is the one who gets her happy ending. Narrated by Julia Whelan.
Nora Stephens is a cutthroat literary agent who lives for her authors and her sister, Libby — and who has been dumped, more than once, by men who leave the city and promptly fall for a wholesome hometown girl. She knows exactly what kind of character she is in the small-town romance of life: the cold, ambitious villain who gets left behind. So when a pregnant Libby drags her to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina, for a sisters' month away, Nora expects to be miserable. Instead she keeps running into Charlie Lastra, a brooding book editor from back in New York whom she can't stand — and who might be the only person who sees her clearly. Emily Henry takes every Hallmark cliché and turns it inside out, delivering a rom-com that's razor-sharp, surprisingly moving about sisterhood and grief, and swoony where it counts.
Julia Whelan narrates, and Book Lovers plays to her greatest strength: banter. Nora and Charlie communicate almost entirely in barbed, hyper-literate sparring, and Whelan's comic timing and precise character voices make every exchange crackle. But she also handles the book's real emotional core — Nora's fierce, complicated love for her sister, and the grief they share over their late mother — with genuine tenderness, so the story never becomes all quips. It's widely considered one of the best Emily Henry audiobooks, and it won the 2022 Goodreads Choice Award for Romance. For a lot of fans, this is the one they'd hand a skeptic to prove Henry-and-Whelan is a great audio pairing.
Rom-com fans who prize sharp, witty dialogue, anyone who works in or loves the book world, and listeners who adore Julia Whelan. If you like your romance smart and a little spiky, this is the one.
If you want a soft, gentle small-town romance, Nora and Charlie are prickly and ambitious on purpose. And if you'd rather the romance stay front and center without a strong sibling subplot, be aware that Nora and Libby's relationship is the emotional heart.
Listen to it. Frequently named the best Emily Henry, and a perfect showcase for Julia Whelan's gift with banter. If Beach Read won you over, this is the immediate next listen.