All That Life Can Afford

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK • Longlisted for the Massachusetts Book Award

“An effervescent debut chock full of Austenian nods. Swoonworthy!” —Sarah McCoy, New York Times bestselling author of Mustique Island

“All That Life Can Afford is about love, ambition, and the cost of belonging, and I cannot stop thinking about it.” —Reese Witherspoon

A young American woman navigates class, lies, and love amid London’s jet-set elite.

I would arrive, blank like a sheet of notebook paper, and write myself new.

Anna first fell in love with London at her hometown library—its Jane Austen balls a far cry from her life of food stamps and hand-me-downs. But when she finally arrives after college, the real London is a moldy flat and the same paycheck-to-paycheck grind—that fairy-tale life still out of reach.

Then Anna meets the Wilders, who fly her to Saint-Tropez to tutor their teenage daughter. Swept up by the sphinxlike elder sister, Anna soon finds herself plunged into a heady whirlpool of parties and excess, a place where confidence is a birthright. There she meets two handsome young men—one who wants to whisk her into his world in a chauffeured car, the other who sees through Anna’s struggle to outrun her past. It’s like she’s stepped into the pages of a glittering new novel, but what will it cost her to play the part?

Sparkling with intelligence and insight, All That Life Can Afford peels back the glossy layers of class and privilege, exploring what it means to create a new life for yourself that still honors the one you’ve left behind.

Emily Everett is an editor and writer from western Massachusetts. Her work appears in The New York Times Modern Love column, The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, and Tin House. She is a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction. Everett grew up on a small family dairy farm, studied English and music at Smith College, and studied abroad for a year at University College London. After graduating, she returned to London to do an M.A. in literature at Queen Mary University of London. She lived and worked in the UK from 2009 to 2013. Everett has been managing editor of The Common, a literary magazine based at Amherst College, since 2016. At The Common, she edits fiction, manages print and online production, and hosts the magazine’s podcast. All That Life Can Afford is her debut novel.