January Andrews writes happily-ever-afters for a living, but she no longer believes in them. Reeling from her father's death and the discovery of the double life he kept hidden, broke and blocked, she retreats to the lakeside Michigan cottage he secretly owned to sort through his things and, she hopes, salvage her career.
The catch: her new next-door neighbor is Augustus Everett, the brooding literary-fiction star who was her rival in college and who has never written anything that ends in anything but despair. Both are stuck. So they make a bargain — over the summer, January will try to write something serious and bleak, and Gus will attempt a love story with a happy ending. To research, they trade field trips: she drags him line-dancing, he takes her to interview the survivors of a local death cult.
What begins as a competitive dare turns into something neither expected, as two people who write for a living learn how hard it is to be honest about their own lives. Warm, funny, and quietly devastating in its handling of grief, Beach Read is a romance about writer's block, disillusionment, and the stubborn possibility of hope.