How Harry Styles Inspired Carley Fortune’s One Golden Summer, the Every Summer After Follow-Up

Carley Fortune exclusively told E! News how Harry Styles helped inspire the title of her new novel One Golden Summer, a follow-up to her debut Every Summer After.

Spoilers for One Golden Summer ahead.

This summer is already golden.

And not just because Carley Fortune is diving back into the world of Barry’s Bay to, at long last, give Charlie Florek his happy ending in One Golden Summer (out now). But when it came time to distill Charlie and Alice Everly’s lakeside love story into the perfect title for her new novel, she was coming up short.

“We really had a hard time coming up with a name for this novel,” Fortune told E! News in an exclusive interview. “Of all the books, this was the hardest.”

Her editor Amanda Bergeron’s solution? Let the music of Harry Styles guide them.

“Amanda was like, ‘You love Harry Styles. I’m going to turn to Harry Styles,’” the novelist recalled. “She was just looking at song titles and lyrics, and she’s like, ‘something, something golden.’”

And Fortune was immediately sold. “I was like, ‘Oh, I love the word golden. It’s so perfect for the book,’” she explained. “That’s how One Golden Summer came to be. So, credit to Mr. Styles.”

Indeed, “Golden” is not just the perfect way to describe the magical glow of the lake at sunset—a staple in Fortune’s books—but also quite fitting for Charlie and Alice’s love after heartbreak.

After all, newly single Alice flees Toronto for Barry’s Bay—where she spent a magical summer as a teen—under the guise of helping her grandmother recover from a broken hip. Enter Charlie, charismatic as ever. And soon, their friendship turns into something more, despite Charlie’s insistence that he’s simply not made for relationships.

Carley Fortune/Instagram

“With both of them, they get to bring their whole self to the table,” Fortune emphasized. “I think when you meet someone who you really connect with, whether it’s a romantic partner or a friend, that is special—you can be a friend to somebody when you can bring your whole self to that person, and that’s what they have.”

As such, it also proved to be a golden opportunity for Fortune to dive deeper into Charlie’s story—and reveal how the dust settled after the dramatic events of the Every Summer After, which saw Charlie’s younger brother Sam fall in love with girl next door Percy.

After its release in 2022, “Charlie kind of occupied my brain for the next few years,” Fortune explained, “and I had readers come up to me at events and demand that he gets his happy ending.”

But after taking a break from writing about Barry’s Bay—releasing Meet Me at the Lake and This Summer Will Be Different in the meantime—she was finally ready for the homecoming. (After all, Ontario lake community is where the novelist grew up.)

Berkley, Penguin Random House

And that meant seeing through the façade Charlie put on for much of Ever Summer After, where, as Furtune puts it, he “played up his role in the family as the joker.” Instead, One Golden Summer details the way he, as the older brother, carried the struggles his family went through into his adulthood.

This is especially brought to the forefront when Charlie—who at 35 is the same age his dad was when he suddenly died—is not only confronting that devastating milestone but also dealing with his own private health battle.

“I really wanted to go there with Charlie in this idea of how we live our lives, how we can be grateful for living,” Fortune noted. “You kind of see this in Every Summer After, too, he gets very frustrated with his brother—he feels like his brother is not grateful for what he has. Charlie is someone who, because of where he is right now, is struggling with mortality.”

“But he is someone who really appreciates being here on this planet,” she continued. “It is not easy to live as a person on this planet, but we only get one shot at it. And I think that’s all part of who he is.”

That said, Fortune is well aware that a major sticking point for some readers is Charlie’s previous dalliance with Percy. And One Golden Summer isn’t necessarily meant to absolve them of their transgression.

Berkley, Penguin Random House

“Percy and Charlie got a lot of slack for something they did as adolescents,” she posited, “and I hope that this book gives people a pause to think about why we make mistakes and how they affect us and how we aren’t defined by our mistakes.

Still, she stressed. “I’m not really looking to change minds on Charlie, but I love hearing when somebody has changed their mind. He’s been my favorite character to write, and I always knew that there was more to him, so it was great to be able to explore that.”

When it comes to where Percy and Sam stand after finding their way back together in Every Summer After? Well, One Golden Summer also solidifies their happy ending revealing, they’re not only married but expecting a baby girl.

As Fortune put it, “Because so much of Every Summer After is tense, it was nice to give people that extra bit of them in their settled life.”