Excerpt from Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The woman barks out a loud, genuine laugh and widens the door. "I'm Jodi," she says with the faint hint of an indeterminate accent—German, maybe. "Come on in."

I step into the cool foyer, the smell of lemon and mint in the air. Jodi doesn't pause or even slow for me, just marches straight into the house, leaving me to pull the door shut and bound after her.

"This place is beautiful," I chirp.

"It's hotter than hell, and Dracula has nothing on the mosquitoes," she says.

I spare a thought for Robert Evans: Yours, mine, and the truth.

At the end of one narrow hallway, she turns down another, the house an airy, bright labyrinth of whitewashed beadboard and sea-glass-colored accents ending in a spacious sitting room whose walls are seventy percent window.

"You wait here, and I'll go grab madame for you," Jodi says, with a detectable edge of amusement in her voice. She unlocks one of the glass back doors and steps into the yard, a vaster and wilder garden than the front, with a small swimming pool set off to one side.

I take the opportunity to make a slow lap around the room, still buzzing and smiling big enough that my jaw has started to ache. I set my things down on the low rattan coffee table and cross my arms to keep myself from touching anything as I wander. Art crowds every inch of the walls, and plants hang in clusters in front of the windows, still more in clay pots on the floor. A thatched fan twirls lazily overhead, and books—most of them about gardening and horticulture—sit in messy stacks and face down with cracked spines, covering every antique-wooden surface available.

It's beautiful. I'm already mentally drafting how I'd describe it. The only problem is, I'm still not convinced I'll have a reason to describe it.

Because so far there's nothing to indicate this is Margaret Ives's house. No photos of her illustrious family. No copies, old or new, of any of their dozens of magazines or newspapers. No framed illustrations of the opulent "House of Ives" where she'd been raised on the California coast, and none of her late husband's Grammys on the mantel either. Nothing concrete to link her to the now-collapsed media juggernaut, or the joys and tragedies the Ives family's competing publications had so loved to catalog back when Margaret was still on top of the world.

The door swings open again, and I spin back to face Jodi, working myself up to demand answers about who exactly invited me to do eleven hours of air travel plus forty-five minutes in a rented Kia Rio for this meeting.

But then I see the woman standing just inside.

She's shrunk a few inches, gained some weight—much of it muscle, I'd guess—and her once jet-black hair is now a mix of mousy brown and silver.

She's been scrubbed clear of any glamour, or air of money and power, but that sly sparkle in her blue eyes is exactly the same as in every photograph I've seen of her, the elusive, unnamable something that had turned her from heiress to a newspaper fortune to princess of the cover page.

"Well, hello there." The warmth in Margaret's voice surprises me, just like it did during our few brief phone calls in the weeks leading up to this trip. "You must be Alice."

She shucks off her gardening gloves and tosses them across the arm of the nearest white rattan chair as she strides barefoot toward me, dusting her hands off on her caftan before stretching one out to shake mine.

"You're her," I say. Every eloquent or even serviceable sentence I've ever put together has been typed out slowly, over time. The ones that come directly from my mouth usually sound more like this.

She laughs. "I was under the impression that was the point."

She gives my hand a little squeeze, then drops it and gestures for me to sit.

"No, it is." I lower myself to the couch. She takes the chair opposite me. "I was just trying not to get my hopes up! It didn't work. Never does. But I keep trying."

Excerpted from Great Big Beautiful Life by Emily Henry. Copyright © 2025 by Emily Henry. Excerpted by permission of Berkley Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.