Funny Story

The desk's affection for Funny Story begins with its premise, which is the single best cold open Emily Henry has written: Daphne's fiancé Peter leaves her, days before the wedding, for his childhood best friend Petra, and the only person in town with a matching vacant apartment and a matching fresh wound is Miles, Petra's discarded boyfriend. Two castoffs of the same catastrophe, splitting rent out of financial necessity and cohabiting out of spite. When an invitation to Peter and Petra's wedding arrives, the pretending starts, and the book's title earns itself: someday, they agree, this will all be a funny story.

What raises it above its excellent setup is Daphne herself. She is a children's librarian who followed Peter to his hometown of Waning Bay, Michigan, and built her entire life inside his (his friends, his family, his geography) so the engagement's collapse leaves her heartbroken and, worse, stateless. She lives in a town that came with the relationship. Henry writes this condition with real precision. The humiliation of borrowed friendships, the quiet terror of realising you cannot name a single thing you would do on a free Saturday. Daphne's arc (assembling a life that is hers, summer reading programme and all) is the book's true romance, and the desk found it the tenderest thing Henry has written since Beach Read.

Miles, meanwhile, is a gem of characterisation. A warm, scattered, aggressively hospitable wine-tour guide whom the whole town adores, whose sunshine the book unmasks as its own kind of armour. The pairing runs on the friction between her guardedness and his geniality, and their apartment scenes (shared playlists, competitive errands, one legendary road trip) have the lived-in texture of Henry's best work. Waning Bay itself, all lake light and cherry festivals, joins her gallery of Michigan summers.

Honest notices. The fake-dating element is a light garnish rather than the engine — readers wanting the full trope apparatus should take The Unhoneymooners first. The exes remain satisfyingly unredeemed. Spice is present, warm, and in character.

Who is this for? Anyone rebuilding after a life plan collapsed, and anyone who has ever moved somewhere for a person. Third in our Emily Henry ranking — her warmest book, and the one whose final chapters the desk defies you to read unmoved. And a word for the librarians: Daphne's working life (story hours, summer reading logistics, the small diplomacy of a public desk) is rendered with a respect the profession rarely receives in fiction, and several of the book's sharpest gags live there. It is a love letter with a due date stamp, and we mean that admiringly.