A lot has changed in Carley Fortune’s world since she sat down to write her first novel, “Every Summer After,” in 2020. Much of it was written on a Muskoka chair overlooking the water in Barry’s Bay, Ont., where she grew up and where that story is set. She wrote her second book, “Meet Me at the Lake,” entirely on her bed back in Toronto. Her husband was home with their second baby and the bedroom door was the only one that closed.
Book number three, “This Summer Will Be Different,” is set on Prince Edward Island but took shape at a little table in the corner of her living room, near a window overlooking the driveway. When she’d spy her family coming home from work, school and daycare, she’d quickly finish her sentence then slam her laptop shut before the happy chaos encroached.
Five years and three novels later — all of which have been No. 1 bestsellers and optioned for screen adaptations, two of which debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list — and Fortune was able to renovate her home last year. She finally has an office to write in, with a door that closes.
It bore her fourth book, “One Golden Summer,” out May 6, as well as the first draft of her fifth, which she’s just turned in. Now 41, Fortune can focus solely on writing. She quit her day job as editor of Refinery 29 Canada after finishing “Every Summer After” with a two-book contract, a publishing team and some big, stress-inducing expectations amplified by postpartum anxiety. “I was just terrified that everything was going to fall apart,” she said.
She needn’t have worried. “That book went on to become such a hit, in a way that I could not have anticipated,” she said. “But the biggest change was this mindset shift, where it was like, OK, this is what I do now. I’m an author.”
The business of being a best-selling author comes with a lot more than writing. Fortune has a slate of events to launch “One Golden Summer,” including a May 13 talk for TIFF’s Share Her Journey series. It’s part of an 11-stop book tour — these have taken her around the world, from Calgary to Arizona to São Paulo, where she’s come face to face with her very enthusiastic readers.
“It’s easy to forget that there are real people who pick up these books,” Fortune said. “Books can really, really affect you. I know that as a reader, and in the way that people send me messages. But until you really meet people in real life and see it and feel it, for me, it didn’t really sink in.”
At every event, Fortune hears from readers that they love the proudly Canadian settings of her novels. She’s become something of a local tourism booster, inspiring trips to P.E.I. to enjoy freshly shucked oysters and seafood chowder poutine like Lucy in “This Summer Will Be Different”; a Texan reader told her they’d booked a trip to an Ontario cottage this summer.
“For Canadians, it feels like home, even if you haven’t been in cottage country. There’s still these references that you’re familiar with,” Fortune said. “And I think for people who aren’t Canadian, it adds to the escape. it feels like you’re being transported somewhere magical.”
It could have been different, though. Fortune’s first book was the story of how she grew up on the lake in Barry’s Bay, a town of 1,200 people just south of Algonquin; her parents ran a local restaurant, and cottagers would come in and out of their lives in the summers. When she started meeting with agents about it, she heard that international readers are not interested in books set in Canada. One suggested switching Barry’s Bay for a U.S. beach town.
Fortune toyed with making it an unspecified, countryless lake community that could be anywhere, but eventually signed with her “dream agent,” L.A.-based Taylor Haggerty, who affirmed the Ontario setting. When the book came out, and Fortune met with U.S. audiences, “I mentioned this thing that Canadians hear, which is that Americans don’t care for stories in Canada. They all scoffed. ‘We love that about this book. We want to go there.’”
Now, we all can again, because “One Golden Summer” returns to Barry’s Bay, and to Charlie Florek, the fan-favourite rakish, teasing older brother of “Every Summer After” lead character, Sam. Sam is now happily married to that book’s heroine, Percy, who had her own memorable steamy, illicit moment with Charlie in a cottage kitchen before returning to her one true love. “People were feral about Charlie. I had people approach me at events asking for a book for him, and they would pitch me on who they thought he should be with,” Fortune said. “They wanted him to have a happily ever after.”
Fortune, too, hadn’t been able to stop thinking about this golden-locked Casanova with a tough exterior, the oldest child in a family where a parent had passed away. “It’s so fun to write him,” she said. “He’s such an antagonist, but in order to really get on somebody’s nerves — and it’s mostly somewhat harmless, stupid stuff — you really have to pay attention to them, and what provokes them. I saw Charlie as someone who saw things that other people didn’t.”
Her challenge was dreaming up a love interest for him, since she’d never started writing with the male character in mind. “It’s always the heroine who comes first, and he develops out of her because it’s like figuring out who she is and what she needs, and who is the partner for her. And so to have to reverse engineer that was really, really tough,” Fortune said.
The answer was Alice, a red-headed photographer from Toronto dealing with self-doubt and a people-pleasing instinct, who spends six weeks at a nearby cottage with her elderly grandmother. “I think what I love about going to the lake for myself is it feels like a time to reset and really think about where I am in my life and in my work, and what I want,” said Fortune. “And that’s how I saw this summer for Alice.”
What sets a good romance novel apart is the chemistry between its leads. Done right, it plunges you into heart-stopping moments like the realization that your crush is returned; that you’ve crossed the point of no return between platonic and romantic; that the feelings are deep on both sides. Fortune excels at this.
“I really love a book where you have a physical reaction; you cry or laugh or gasp out loud. For me, the best physical reaction, and it’s so rare, is when there’s a scene of longing: My chest gets all tight, and it rolls through me like this heat wave,” Fortune said. “Your whole body is along for the ride. I’m always just trying to conjure that for people.”
Spice level is a hotly discussed topic among romance readers and bloggers, who assign chili pepper ratings to give a sense of how much heat to expect. Fortune’s books tend to land between two and three chilies out of five. In “One Golden Summer,” there’s a standout skinny-dipping scene, all “slick skin and cool water” — something of a cottage-country fantasy — when Alice and Charlie first see each other undressed. It didn’t come easily; Fortune rewrote it when her editor suggested it be more “fulsome.”
In general, Fortune finds it hard to write sex scenes, to avoid “the game of Twister; like, left hand goes here…” and not repeat words. “For me, the intimate scenes really need to feel real, but they’re also moving the story forward in some way,” she said. “They’re showing you something about the characters and how they relate to each other. They’re not there as jewelry.”
Fortune sort of fell into the romance category since her first book contained a love story and a happy ending, the two essential ingredients for the genre that has exploded in recent years (Canadian romance novel sales grew 404 per cent and library loans 640 per cent between 2020 and 2024).
“Romance has always been the biggest genre going, and romance readers are the most voracious readers,” said Fortune. She became one in late 2018, when she had a stressful job and busy toddler, starting with “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before” by Jenny Han. “I was like, this is such a delight, and what a nice break from the trash fire that is my life right now,” Fortune said. “Sometimes (romance novels) are very emotional, sometimes they’re quite funny and you’re guaranteed a happy ending, which is all I could deal with at the time. And also they were about how women were making their way through the world.”
Romance authors and readers still receive sexist “side eye,” Fortune said. “People are always going to make women feel smaller for liking what they like, but I think more and more, readers are very confidently sharing the books that they love,” she said. “With TikTok and Bookstagram, the shame around reading romance books has really been dismantled. It’s so beautiful.”
Apparently, two readers who especially loved “Meet Me at the Lake” are Harry and Meghan, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who purchased rights to adapt it for the screen through their production company Archewell in partnership with Netflix. When this was announced in 2023, there was much interest in the British royal couple’s decision to option a love story partly set in Toronto, where Meghan lived when she and Harry met.
“There was a very big news cycle, and then it’s kind of, you know, back to work,” said Fortune. At the time, she told the Star that she felt the match was right, that Archewell and Netflix would take good care of her story. “I felt like it would be given a lot of care, and I think that is the case,” Fortune says now, almost two years later. Any updates on the forthcoming movie? “I can say it’s in development. So far, it’s been a really great experience.”
In January, Fortune travelled to Los Angeles to visit the writers’ room for the Amazon Prime series based on her first book, with the tweaked title “Every Year After,” which is well under way. She found it surreal to see that what started as a side project, written mostly from a deck chair, had turned into “not just an adaptation, but a business that is bringing a large team of people together to bring it to life,” she said. “When I walked into the room, there were all these inspiration boards with photos and collages, and one of the pictures was the Welcome to Barry’s Bay sign. I was like, Here I am in L.A., and there is my hometown. It’s really cool.”
