Carley Fortune’s summer romance Every Summer After is heading to the screen as Every Year After, an eight-episode series that will have its world premiere at the Tribeca Film Festival on June 8 before debuting on Prime Video a couple days later. The adaptation centers on Percy Fraser, played by Sadie Soverall, and the brothers who shaped her summers in Barry’s Bay, Ontario: Sam, played by Matt Cornett, and Charlie Florek, played by Michael Bradway.
Fortune wrote the novel in the summer of 2020, drawing on her upbringing in Barry’s Bay, and the book went on to spend 16 weeks on bestseller list after its 2022 publication. The screen version follows Percy through every summer of her teens at her family’s cottage, where she befriends her next-door neighbors Sam and Charlie before a relationship with Sam turns into what the story describes as an exhilarating but fleeting romance. Years later, Percy comes back for the funeral of Sam and Charlie’s mother, Sue, played by Elisha Cuthbert.
Amazon MGM Studios brought Amy B. Harris into the project early last year, and she said she received the book on a Thursday and finished it within 24 hours. Harris said she was so immersed in Carley’s world, and in Sam and Percy’s love story, that she wanted to honor the book and the characters while expanding it into something that could run for years. At her first meeting with Fortune, Harris pitched the show’s opening scene at Chantal’s engagement party, a choice that signaled the series would reach beyond the novel without losing its emotional center.
That balance mattered because the show is drawn not only from Every Summer After but also from Fortune’s sequel One Golden Summer. The source material is built around first love, second chances and the long estrangement between Percy and Sam, but Fortune said some of her favorite scenes in the series were not taken directly from her books. She is an executive producer, though she did not sit in on any Zoom chemistry reads and did not have final say in casting.
The production also faced a practical issue that has become familiar to television makers: chemistry is hard to judge over a computer screen. To deal with that, the producers gave each pair of actors 10 minutes to get to know one another separately. Fortune said that once she saw the project taking shape, she knew it was in the right hands, and Harris said the goal was always to make a series that respected the novel while leaving room for more than one summer’s worth of storytelling. For viewers, the question is no longer whether the book can travel; it already has. The real test begins June 8, when Percy’s story reaches an audience that knows the ending and may still want to stay for every year after.
