No one was ever meant to read Every Summer After.
The best-selling book’s author, Carley Fortune, was a journalist at the time and had spent 15 years climbing the ranks before leading Refinery29 Canada. It was the pandemic, and the writer found herself frustrated professionally and burnt out. The publication had acquired by Vice Media Group, and as Fortune put it, things became messy.
“I spent most of my time arguing on behalf of my team with the company,” Fortune tells The Hollywood Reporter on a recent Zoom. The 42-year-old, who was back at the Canadian lake she grew up on, recalls slamming the phone down after a particularly frustrating call.
She swore to herself in that moment she’d write a book by the end of the year. “I have not done anything creative for myself at all as an adult. It has all been for work and I need to do something for me,” she recalls thinking to herself.
That novel became her passion project. She would get up at 5 a.m. before her husband and son were awake to write. She’d give herself daily word counts. She thought back to her teenage and childhood journals, which she’d read earlier in lockdown, and endeavored to write about “that kind of girlhood and drama with friends and with boys” through an adult lens.
“I finished the book in four months,” Fortune says. She never planned to publish it, but things didn’t go quite as planned. She admits, “That was Every Summer After.”
Fast forward to 2026 and that passion project has become a best-seller novel and a popular television series. The show, renamed Every Year After, just wrapped its first season on Prime Video. “When it came time to talk to producers and streamers about adapting it, it felt very farfetched,” the author says. “I knew that books get optioned all the time and nothing really happens with them.”
But, thankfully for Fortune and lovers of her summer-set romance novel, Every Summer After persisted. She’d sold the rights to Amazon in summer 2022, when the novel first came out. It survived a writer’s strike and changes in slate before finally getting a greenlight. Over the years things progressed, but Fortune feels things started clicking into place when Harris joined the project.
“She was such a true fan of the book. In our first conversation, she outlined how she saw the show opening, and it gave me goosebumps,” Fortune says. “It was a little bit different from the book, but it had the heart and soul of the book.”
Every Year After had departures from the original story, but the author put her trust in Harris and the team. “Sometimes were changes [that] when I got to it, I was very shocked. Then I thought about it and it made so much sense [for] a TV series,” says Fortune.
There were certain changes, however, that were nonnegotiable for the author. The biggest was its Canadian setting. Every Summer After, set in Barry’s Bay, where Fortune grew up, centers around Percy (Sadie Soverall) and Sam (Matt Cornett). The story follows the pair as they grow from friends to lovers to strangers over the course of six summers in the past, and one weekend in the present that brings them back together.
In an earlier version of Every Year After’s pilot script, before Harris came on board, the show was set in Barry’s Bend, Wisconsin. The writer was very vocal with her feedback; it must stay in Canada, particularly given how important it had become to its Canadian readers.
The author doesn’t think Amazon would’ve ever let a non-Canadian setting happen. “But I was never going to be somebody who just handed a project over and said goodbye to it,” she adds.
Fortune also felt strongly that Sam’s mother Sue, whose passing sends Percy back to Barry’s Bay after a phone call from her other son Charlie (Bradway), should be Canadian. Prime agreed, and Elisha Cuthbert’s name was thrown into the mix.
The author was kicking herself for nothing of the actress first. Fortune thought she was perfect for the role. She adds, “We’re the exact same age, and I just felt like I had grown up with her.”
Every Summer After was a bit of a saving grace for Fortune, who had been at crossroads moment in her life, and set her on a new path. “It was like a personality transplant. That’s how my husband describes it. It poured out of me,” she says.
The process made her realize how much she enjoyed writing fiction. “It was such a relief to me,” Fortune says. “I felt very strongly that I was at the end of my journalism career, and I didn’t know what to do.”
Fortune had signed a two-book deal, which means before Every Summer After had released, she’d begun on what would become her second book, Meet Me at the Lake. She was in a different place than she was when writing Every Summer After.
“I gave birth to my second child just before I began writing, I was a mess,” she says. “I felt like the first book had been a complete fluke and that I couldn’t do it again.”
The writer struggled with her mental health postpartum. Things were different with Meet Me at the Lake, the timeline was longer and the edits were larger, which got the writer into a cycle of negative self-talk. “I submitted the first draft and I basically had to rewrite half of it. My editor gave me a note that meant that I had to throw out half the book and redo it in two months,” she says.
“I felt like I had failed because editing Every Summer After was two weeks, if you can believe,” Fortune adds. She cried for two days, she says, and then put on her “journalist hat“ and sat down to do the work. She describes the experience as liberating.
Fortune’s set herself up for a pace of a book per year. She’s since released This Summer Will Be Different, Our Golden Summer, a follow-up to Every Summer After centered around Charlie’s character, and most recently Our Perfect Storm.
Last weekend, Fortune and the showrunner, Amy B. Harris, along with cast members Matt Cornett and Bradway, announced the show’s been renewed for a second season at the streamer’s YA fan-focused event, Obsessed Fest. The season will follow the plot of Our Golden Summer, finding Bradway and his soon-to-be love interest in the spotlight.
More immediately, however, Fortune will find herself on Prince Edward Island as shooting is set to begin on This Summer Will Be Different’s adaptation this summer. Fortune’s teamed up with Netflix Canada for the project. The Netflix’s team job is to make Canadian content that resonates with a global, and the author is only interested in telling these Canadian stories that clearly have no problem reaching global audiences. It seems like a bit of dream match.
“Danielle and Tara who had up Netflix Canada, we had had a drink together before they had even read it, and I loved them,” the author says. “Their view on TV and film just aligned so much with how I saw things.”
Things are progressing with the adaptation. They’ve brought on a producing partner in Sphere Media and husband and wife showrunning duo, Dane Clark (Suze, One More Time) and Linsey Stewart (Workin’ Moms and North of North).
“I’ve read the first episode script, and it’s great. It’s all moving very, very quickly, but it felt like it was almost like matchmaking, where you can see that this is the perfect fit,” Fortune says. “We’re casting now, which is very exciting.”
As it always seems to for Fortune, all roads lead back to the picturesque Canadian settings in her books. “Writing about these places is almost my favorite thing to do,” she says.
This Summer Will Be Different’s Prince Edward Island setting is a bit of dream for the writer, who touts herself as a massive Anne of Green Gables fan. “There is no piece of culture that has been more influential on my work,” Fortune says.
“It was so fun to be able to set a contemporary romance on a place that was known for such a chaste [piece of media]. To look at Prince Edward Island from a modern point of view and then to be able to shoot there and do that through TV is one of the things I am most excited about,” the author says. She’s encountered fans of her work that have begun traveling to these locations because of the books.
Fortune’s family ran an inn and restaurant in Barry’s Bay, so she’s thrilled to see fellow Canadians traveling around the country and all those around the world she’s been able to introduce to places she loves. ”Feeling transported to these places is always one of my goals. I think it’s something the TV show does beautifully,” she says. “That sense of nostalgia and the way that our heart is tied up in people and places is really, really beautiful. [Every Summer After] is about Percy making this mistake, but it’s not just about losing a guy. It’s about losing the place that means so much to her and so much to her creativity.”
She adds, “I hope that ultimately people end up feeling good about our capacity to love and forgive really, that you feel like your heart has grown. It sounds corny, but it’s true.”
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