Some stories refuse to stay on the page. The Hollywood Reporter’s Beyond the Book column explores what happens when books make the leap to screen and beyond — unpacking what changed, how it was done and why it matters with the creatives who made it.
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[Warning: This story contains major spoilers for Prime Video’s Every Year After.]
Celebrated author William Falkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” The Nobel Prize laureate likely didn’t intend for his now-famous phrase to describe a romance novel, which on June 10 debuted its highly anticipated TV adaptation, Every Year After, on Prime Video. But it’s a fitting description nonetheless for the kind of story that unfolds within author Carley Fortune’s 2022 book Every Summer After.
The New York Times best-selling second-chance romance traces how the relationship between best friends-turned-lovers Persephone “Percy” Fraser (Sadie Soverall) and Sam Florek (Matt Cornett) once fell apart. A love story deconstructed and reconstructed across alternating timelines, their past becomes present when Percy returns to Barry’s Bay, the lakeside town where she spent her summers as a teen, and first fell in love with Sam.
