When it comes to choosing her summer reads, Carley Fortune goes for books that are all-consuming. “I want to be pulled in and find it almost impossible to stop reading,” she says on a recent video call from her home in Toronto. “It can be any genre, but I want a book to be propulsive and transportive.”

“Propulsive” and “transportive” are two words that aptly describe Fortune’s own latest, Our Perfect Storm (Berkley, May 5), which our starred review calls “a powerfully strong romance for readers who like their love stories full of torment and passion.” Frankie Gardiner and George Saint James have been best friends ever since George moved in with his grandmother next door to Frankie’s family. When Frankie gets engaged to an older professor, their friendship falters. But when that fiancé dumps her right before the wedding, she decides to take her planned honeymoon trip anyway—with George as her travel companion. Naturally, complications ensue as the two of them share a room in paradise. There’s longing, angst, the classic friends-to-lovers trope, and a beautiful setting in Tofino, a scenic surf town on Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

“All my books begin with the setting,” Fortune says, “and Tofino is a place I fell in love with in my early 20s. It’s stunningly beautiful, and unlike anywhere I’ve been before. It’s this misty rainforest that collides with the beach, and it’s extremely dramatic. It really feels like you’re standing at the end of the word. It was in the back of my mind as a place I wanted to revisit in a book, and I was just looking for a story that could match its intensity.”

Fortune also gleaned inspiration from a classic source: Little Women, specifically the 1994 film adaptation starring Winona Ryder as Jo and Christian Bale as Laurie. After writing about characters who are polar opposites in One Golden Summer, she wanted to focus on characters who have more similarities than differences.

“We had [Little Women] on VHS and I watched it over and over again. Jo and Laurie aren’t meant to work out because they’re too stubborn—they would kill each other—but sometimes I would turn the movie off, incensed, after Jo turns down Laurie’s proposal. But what if we had these two fiery characters and put them together? How would that work out? Could it work out?”

Fortune is known for tumultuous, deeply romantic books that are tailor-made for the summer season. Part of their appeal lies in those picture-postcard settings. “I can’t see a story unless I can see where it happens,” she says, “and it’s something I love when I’m reading. I love when I’m transported to a place in a book.” This Summer Will Be Different takes place on Prince Edward Island—notably the setting of another beloved classic, Anne of Green Gables. In March, Fortune announced that a Netflix adaptation is on the way, to be filmed in Toronto and on Prince Edward Island. Fortune is thrilled. “They understand that the setting is so important,” she says of the Netflix Canada team. “I’ve had a really good feeling about it from the start.”

This Summer Will Be Different isn’t Fortune’s only book making its way to the screen. Prince Harry and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, are set to produce a Netflix film based on Meet Me at the Lake. And in June, Every Year After, an adaptation of her novel Every Summer After, premieres on Prime Video. “I’m so excited,” Fortune says. “It’s really good. I cried at the first scene, and I bawled through the finale. I can’t wait for people to see it. Our showrunner, Amy B. Harris, is so talented. In our first conversation, she described how she saw the opening scene play out on the show, and it was a little bit different from the book, but it was great. The hair on my arms stood up, and I just felt like it was in good hands with her.”

Even though Fortune always loved books, she didn’t know they would lead her to the acclaim she enjoys today. She grew up in Barry’s Bay, a small lakeside town in Ontario that’s the setting for Every Summer After and One Golden Summer. She spent her time reading and writing, but making a career as a novelist didn’t seem like a plausible life goal. Instead, she majored in journalism and had a successful career that led her to become the executive editor of Refinery29 Canada, a site dedicated to fashion, beauty, and wellness.

But while her dream of writing a book was on hold, it never really went away. As frustration with her job came to a head in 2020, she committed to making that dream come true. She recalls a particularly stressful phone call while staying at the lake. “I was on a landline, and I so clearly remember slamming the phone down and saying, ‘I’m going to write a book.’”

She gave herself a firm deadline: the end of the year. “It was something I just needed to do for myself. I’d given and given to my career, and it wasn’t giving back. I needed to reclaim a piece of my creativity. I figured out how much I needed to write in a day to finish a book by the end of the year, and it was 388 words. I’d get up really early—before my kid was awake, before I had to work—and write. And that book became Every Summer After.”

Fortune never even intended to publish it, saying she wrote the novel to show herself she could do it and to pay tribute to her summers growing up on the lake. “It was for me, for my heart.”

Now that her books routinely top bestseller lists and she has millions of devoted readers around the world, Fortune’s life has changed dramatically, but her desire to tell stories remains. “When I worked in journalism, I would assign and write stories about the way we live—particularly the way women live—our finances, our health, our careers, our relationships, our politics. I’ve been trying to align that work with the work of writing fiction, and I think Our Perfect Storm is the closest I’ve come to doing that. I’m so proud of this one.”

Between juggling TV projects and now touring for Our Perfect Storm, Fortune’s schedule is full. “I’m more overwhelmed than I’ve ever been, but it’s all wonderful things.” Still, she makes time for reading. Her summer recommendations include Annabel Monaghan’s Dolly All the Time (“I just love how she writes about life and families so beautifully”) and The Missed Connection by Tia Williams, one of her favorite romance authors.

Oh, and one more thing: Fortune is already hard at work on her sixth book. Readers will just have to wait and see where she transports us next.

Kerry Winfrey is the author of Waiting for Tom Hanks and other titles.