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The Essentials With Carley Fortune: “Off Campus,” Tofino and All Things Barry’s Bay

The bestselling novelist shares the settings, shows, skincare and travel staples she returns to, from Barry’s Bay nostalgia to Tofino’s foggy coastline.

When Carley Fortune began writing her first novel during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, she never anticipated having it published. Not only did Every Summer After land a spot on the New York Times best-seller list shortly following its publication in 2022, but now, readers who fell in love with Fortune’s protagonists (and their romantic saga that played out in the lakeside town of Barry’s Bay) can see the story brought to life in the Amazon Prime series, Every Year After. “When I wrote Every Summer After, we spent that summer at a cottage very close to where I grew up on the lake in Barry’s Bay,” Fortune, who is currently based in Toronto, tells Observer. “I was writing really early in the morning before my job, before my kid got up, and I was writing just for myself—I was trying to write about how I grew up and where I grew up.”

In the four years since the release of her debut novel, Fortune has written four more bestselling books, all of which are set in different picturesque locations in her native Canada. And while she notes that her writing process has changed, one thing that remains the same is allowing the location to serve as her foundation. “I need to know where the action takes place before I can figure out what that story will be,” she says. “And the settings so far are all places that I’m very familiar with, like Barry’s Bay, where I grew up, which is the setting for two of my books.”

In her latest novel, Our Perfect Storm, Fortune decided to re-explore the coastal town of Tofino on the west coast of Vancouver Island in British Columbia. “I visited Tofino twice when I was in my 20s living on Vancouver Island, and I just fell in love with it,” she recalls. “There are ancient rainforests with trees that are like 300, 400 years old, and then the rainforest runs right........

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