Author Talk with Emily Everett of All That Life Can Afford
Thursday, July 16th 2026 at 6:00 PM EDT
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Emily Everett is an editor and writer from western Massachusetts. Her debut novel All That Life Can Afford is the Reese’s Book Club pick for April 2025, out now from Putnam Books. She is managing editor at The Common literary magazine, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Fellow in Fiction.
Emily 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 MA in literature at Queen Mary University of London. She lived and worked in the UK from 2009 to 2013.
Her work has appeared in The New York Times Modern Love column, the Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. Her short story “Solitária” was selected as a runner-up for the Kenyon Review’s 2019 Short Fiction Contest. Her work has been selected for Best Small Fictions 2020, and supported by the Vermont Studio Center.
A taut and lyrical coming-of-age debut about a young American woman navigating 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.
The views expressed by presenters are their own and their appearance in a program does not imply an endorsement of them or any entity they represent. Reference to any specific product or entity does not constitute an endorsement or recommendation by McMaster University.