Alice Scott is a warm, up-and-coming writer who badly wants the assignment of her life: the authorized biography of Margaret Ives, the elusive octogenarian heiress of a scandal-shadowed media dynasty who vanished from public view decades ago. The catch is that Alice isn't the only one Margaret has summoned to the sleepy Georgia island of Little Crescent. So has Hayden Anderson — an aloof, Pulitzer-winning journalist and exactly the kind of intimidating rival Alice doesn't need.
Margaret proposes a contest: she'll meet with each of them separately for a month, feeding them fragments of her story, and then choose whose version she trusts to tell it. Bound by an ironclad NDA, Alice and Hayden can't compare notes — but they can't seem to stay away from each other either, and the pull between them threatens the very prize they're chasing.
Braiding a present-day romance with a century-long family saga of fame, love, and betrayal, Great Big Beautiful Life is Emily Henry at her most expansive — a novel about all the kinds of love that shape a life, and about who gets to decide how a story ends.