Before Carley Fortune wrote a single word of fiction, she had already built a distinguished career telling other people's stories. An award-winning journalist, she worked as a writer and editor at some of Canada's most respected publications — The Globe and Mail, Chatelaine, Toronto Life, and The Grid — before overseeing the launch of Refinery29 Canada, where she served as Executive Editor. She left journalism in 2021 to write novels full time, a decision that would prove quietly seismic for contemporary romance.
Her debut, Every Summer After (2022), arrived as an instant sensation. A dual-timeline second-chance romance set in Barry's Bay, a small lakeside town in rural Ontario where Fortune spent meaningful parts of her childhood, the novel became a number one New York Times bestseller and announced her as a serious new force in the genre. The story of Percy and Sam — childhood friends whose summers together unravelled in a single moment — earned praise from established names in romantic fiction and accumulated hundreds of thousands of reader ratings. Fortune's journalist instincts show clearly in the precision of her character work; her people feel observed rather than invented.
Her second novel, Meet Me at the Lake (2023), followed and made bestseller lists in both Canada and the United States. Set partly in Toronto and partly in Muskoka's lake country, it centres on a woman drawn back to her family's lakeside resort and the stranger she spent exactly one charged day with years before. The book was optioned by Archewell Productions for development as a film, produced by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, bringing Fortune's work to a significantly wider international audience.
This Summer Will Be Different (2024) moved the setting to Prince Edward Island's red sand coastline — a deliberate departure from Ontario's lake country — and traced a friends-to-lovers story complicated by the constraints of loyalty and timing. The novel is currently in production as a Netflix series, with Fortune serving as an Executive Producer.
One Golden Summer (2025) returned to Barry's Bay and to characters readers had encountered in Every Summer After. It functions as a companion novel, most rewarding for those who have read the debut first, and it underlines how effectively Fortune has built a recurring fictional world from a single geographical anchor. Her fifth book, Our Perfect Storm, was published in May 2026, with Fortune already working on a sixth novel.
Across all five books, certain qualities remain constant. Fortune writes romance with a strong sense of place — the specific light of an Ontario summer, the particular texture of cottage-country life — and her narratives consistently turn on memory, missed timing, and the question of whether the past can be honestly reckoned with. Dual timelines appear frequently, allowing her to explore how people become who they are before she shows who they might still become. The emotional register is warm without being saccharine, and the romantic tension tends to build slowly, rooted in friendship or history before it tips into something more.
Her books have sold more than four million copies worldwide, been translated into thirty languages, and all have been optioned for screen adaptation. The Amazon MGM Studios series Every Year After, based on Every Summer After, premiered in June 2026. Fortune serves as an Executive Producer on both the Prime Video and Netflix productions. She lives in Toronto with her husband and two sons, and is widely regarded as one of the defining voices in contemporary romance fiction today.
