'Every Year After': Your exclusive first look at Prime Video’s upcoming Carley Fortune series

every year after percy sam

Amongst the sparkling waters and wooden boardwalks of Bowen Island, a 20-minute ferry ride off the coast of Vancouver, Sadie Soverall and Matt Cornett carried around copies of Carley Fortune’s Every Summer After like it was the Bible. That’s the word they both use to describe Fortune’s 2022 debut: “the Bible.” As the actors portraying the story’s main characters, Percy and Sam, in Prime Video’s upcoming television adaptation of the book—renamed Every Year After—they treated the source material with a passion that bordered on religious zeal. “I had it with me every day on set,” Soverall tells ELLE. “I would read it moments before we were about to film, to get back into what was happening, at the time, for Percy, in her head.” To put it simply, she treated Fortune’s story with the kind of reverence an author—and her fans—can only dream of.

And there are many, many fans of Fortune’s Every Summer After, which spent 16 weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, sold more than a million copies, and put Fortune’s name amongst such genre stalwarts as Emily Henry, Jenny Han, and Ali Hazelwood. It didn’t take long for Soverall and Cornett to count themselves amongst those fans: Soverall read the book during her audition process; Cornett picked it up immediately after he learned he’d secured the role of Sam. At the time, he was filming another project in rural North Carolina, and he drove 45 minutes to a Barnes & Noble to buy the first copy of the novel he could find. “It was the best drive of my life,” Cornett says, grinning.

But well before Soverall and Cornett joined the Fortune fandom, it was Amazon’s executives who recognized that the Every Summer After IP was something special. The story centers on Persephone “Percy” Fraser, who spends each summer of her adolescence in the quaint Canadian town of Barry’s Bay, where she soon befriends her neighbors, brothers Charlie and Sam Florek. Percy and Sam become near-instant best friends and, as they grow older and more self-assured, their childhood affection blooms into romance. Years later, after a devastating mistake—and multiple years of silence between Percy and Sam—Percy returns to Barry’s Bay to attend a funeral for Charlie and Sam’s mother, Sue. There, Percy sees Sam again for the first time…and all the old feelings come flooding back.

Matt Cornett and Sadie Soverall as Sam and Percy in Every Year After.

“This was a book that was beloved by the creatives at Amazon, and they literally just sent me the book and said, ‘Would you like to take a look at this?’” says showrunner Amy B. Harris, who took on the adaptation as part of her overall deal with Amazon MGM Studios after previously announced showrunner Leila Gerstein exited the project. The executives told Harris they were “trying to figure out how to create a series that really is a love letter to Carley’s book,” and that they didn’t “want to stray too far away from it” but welcomed “a bigger ensemble than the book has.” More than up to the challenge, Harris “devoured” Every Summer After in less than 24 hours. “I was up until 3 in the morning reading, then back up at 6,” she says. “I could not put it down.”

The result of all that devotion is, at last, an eight-episode series, which ELLE can exclusively reveal will premiere on June 10, 2026.

Told over a six-year timeline, the show stars Soverall and Cornett alongside Michael Bradway as Charlie, Sam’s brother; Aurora Perrineau as Chantal, adult Percy’s best friend; Abigail Cowen as Delilah, young Percy’s best friend; Joseph Chiu as Jordie, Sam’s best friend; and Elisha Cuthbert as Sue, Charlie and Sam’s mother. Filmed in 2025 in and around Vancouver, and particularly on Bowen Island, the series proudly honors the book’s Canadian DNA, which Fortune felt strongly needed to be preserved. “Her stories always are about her Canadian life and the worlds that she loves and knows,” Harris says. “It was very important that it not be generic, like, ‘Oh, this could be anywhere.’ No, [Barry’s Bay] is a Canadian town. It’s not the Hamptons; it’s this very beautiful, down-to-earth, grounded place.”

As one of the executive producers for the series, Fortune says she “wasn’t completely hands-off,” but neither was she “breathing down anybody’s neck, either.” She considered her most important role was as a voice “for the fans,” she says, ensuring that the show depicted “the kinds of things that fans want to see.” (For example: Eagle-eyed book lovers will recognize numerous Easter eggs, as well as dialogue ripped directly from the novel, such as Sam’s beloved line to Percy upon her return to Barry’s Bay: “You came home.”)

Sadie Soverall and Matt Cornett as Percy and Sam in Every Year After.

Fortune also provided an emotional perspective that helped keep the series grounded in its themes of love, forgiveness, and second chances. “Because this was my first novel, it’s very personal to me,” she says. “When I wrote it, I didn’t even intend to publish it. It was just this personal project. And then to see it brought to life in this really beautiful way, and see all the people it takes to do so, was so profound and meaningful.”

Despite the central focus on Percy and Sam’s love story, Harris aimed to build out a true “ensemble cast,” with Bradway, Perrineau, Cowen, Chiu, and Cuthbert all earning expanded roles beyond what exists in Fortune’s novel. These supporting characters develop story arcs and relationships amongst one another that will surprise readers—and hopefully invite in new devotees. The ensemble also helped release some of the pressure around Soverall and Cornett; they not only had each other to lean on, but also a larger group of castmates who became trusted friends.

“With an IP as big as this book, there is this sense of, like, ‘I have to get this right,’” Cornett says. “And so I was really nervous about not getting it right. There were those voices of doubt in my head. I remember just shoving those down, shoving those down. And the second I did my first scene with Michael [Bradway], he eased all my nerves.” As Sam’s brother, Charlie, Bradway’s brotherly support extended off-screen. “I was like, ‘Dude, I’m really struggling,’” Cornett recalls. “‘I don’t feel like I’m locked in as Sam yet.’ And he was like, ‘Well, it is day one.’ And I was like, ‘...That’s fair.’”

Regarding the ensemble approach, Harris notes that the opportunity to expand the world of Barry’s Bay was one of her main draws to the project—and it also offers an explanation as to why the novel’s title was renamed for Prime Video’s adaptation.

“This is a series that I think should go on and on and on for as long as Amazon will have me and have the show,” she says. “I personally would love the show to live in many seasons. The book is obviously Every Summer After and takes place during the summer, and the first season does take place in the summer. But what I was intrigued by is that it isn’t just every summer that [these characters] have been…dealing with the ramifications of their behavior. That doesn’t just affect your summers; it affects every year of your life.” Harris continues, “I’ve been thinking a lot about the next season [of the show], and wanting there to be a fall, a winter, a spring.”

She emphasizes that Sam and Percy are indeed “the spine and soul of the show,” but the supporting characters will play increasingly central roles as the episodes move forward in time. “For me to build a series, you don’t want it to be just two people,” Harris says. “I wanted to know who was in their lives and why. It tells us more about Percy that Chantal is in her life now, and Delilah is coming back into her life, and she and Jordie had a friendship in the past. How does he feel about her now? Building out that world…gives specificity to our two leads as we’re exploring their story.”

Should Prime Video greenlight a second season, Harris plans to “take a lot” from Fortune’s 2025 novel One Golden Summer, which depicts Charlie’s own love story, while ensuring the remaining core characters from the first season continue to have their arcs depicted “in a really beautiful way.”

Both Soverall and Cornett profess excitement at the idea of returning for a second season, with Cornett specifically adding, “Everyone already knows that I will do this show as long as they want me to do the show.” He teases, “I think Carley has another book [coming] that we can dive deep into. I’ve been trying to get information out of her; she will not give me anything. I hope she’s writing more books in this world, but she’s really good at keeping that under lock and key.”

All Fortune will reveal to ELLE is that she’s about to turn in the first draft of her next project, which she hopes to finish before she heads out on a book tour for her upcoming novel, Our Perfect Storm, out on May 5. As overwhelmed as she is these days, juggling multiple projects—in addition to Every Year After and her books, Netflix announced on March 19 that Fortune’s 2024 novel This Summer Will Be Different is getting its own 10-episode series adaptation—the author recognizes the gift of a story like Every Summer After getting such a carefully respectful treatment.

“The book in the past and the show now are coming out at a time when we desperately need a reminder of why it’s beautiful to be alive and human,” Fortune says, “and how powerful it is to love and forgive.”

Aurora Perrineau as Chantal and Sadie Soverall as Percy in Every Year After.

Soverall considers Every Year After the kind of story that reminds viewers “you can have a relationship with yourself and your past that is healthy and positive and kind” and that “allows you to think that maybe things can change; maybe amends can be made, and maybe you can face things that are hard.”

Cornett surprised himself by watching the first five episodes of the show in preparation for the summer premiere. “I don’t really ever watch the things I do,” he admits. But after taking a chance and watching the show, he says, “it feels like we encapsulated what we wanted to. I really hope fans feel [Percy and Sam’s] chemistry and their love for each other.” He adds, smiling, “I feel very good. I feel very proud of this one.”

For her part, Harris is thrilled to have a series on her hands that tackles “hard things with a lot of optimism.” She concludes, “The thing I’m most interested in writing is coming-of-age, and I think if you’re lucky, you come of age your whole life. It’s not just your first love story or your youth. We’re all learning how to be the people we’re supposed to be.”

Sadie Soverall as Percy and Elisha Cuthbert as Sue in Every Year After.