All That Life Can Afford: Reese's Book Club - Hardcover

Everett, Emily

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0593545141 ISBN 13: 9780593545140

Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2025

Inhaltsangabe

A REESE’S BOOK CLUB PICK

“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.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Emily Everett is an editor and writer from western Massachusetts. Her short fiction appears in The Kenyon Review, Electric Literature, Tin House, and Mississippi Review. 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.

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1

London

October 2009

I'd never been a great actor or a convincing liar, and an American in Britain will always be scrutinized. I prayed the ticket inspector might think I was an idiot, like all Americans, and not a crook, like most of the people he found on the train to Brighton without a ticket to cover their fare.

Instructors like me had to pay for our own tickets when we traveled to teach weekly SAT-prep sessions at posh boarding schools around the English countryside. Not that you'd know they were schools-more like mansions, refurbed monasteries, drafty Hogwarts-type castles. I'd seen a few already in the four months I'd worked for Kramer Test Prep, but this was the first time I hadn't had the money for my train ticket. I'd formed a weak plan on my way to the station. A shite plan, my flatmate Andre would've said. My first plan had been to borrow the money from him, but he hadn't come home last night.

I'd been poor all my life, in a mundane, lower-working-class way-food stamps, hand-me-downs, pancakes for dinner-and it had bred in me a scrappy sort of boldness that only backfired about fifty percent of the time. Sometimes it seemed like that scrappiness was the only thing I still shared with my father.

The plan was a big risk, but I'd be fired if I missed my class. The travel bonus was £40 each trip; that alone made a typical ten-week class worth more than half a month's rent to me. I'd emailed my supervisor the second the Brighton class was posted, terrified that someone would scoop it up before me. I needed that bonus, even if it only came at the end of the whole class, months later. Months of Saturdays spent on long train rides, cursing everything: the city of Brighton, its icy coastal winds, its historic clifftop boarding school for girls, which I had never heard of but which, when mentioned, impressed my British acquaintances so much-You teach at Roedean?-that I'd quickly learned to use it as social currency.

But it was actual currency I needed, and so far I hadn't seen a pound for my Roedean SAT class.

The shite plan was not complicated. For the first forty-five minutes on the swaying, southbound train, I only had to pretend to sleep. No easy task, my body thrumming with nervous energy. Fare-dodging was no joke here. I'd once seen a ticket inspector rap his knuckles loudly on a train window for ten minutes, trying to wake a "sleeping" man, certainly ticketless. The man later hid in the bathroom, and two stations later the ticket inspector walked him off the train to a waiting semicircle of British Transport Police. Here on an easily revoked student visa, I feared even the lightest brush with the law.

The visa was my ticking clock: I had a year, essentially, to create a solvent, stable life. By this time next year, if I wanted to stay in London, I'd need a completed master's degree, which would earn me a two-year "post-study" work visa. Then I could really begin to make my way in this place that felt more like home than home had in a long time.

On good days I believed it was possible. I could walk through London, my city, and feel that I had achieved something great just by being there. Here I was, taking the Tube, rising on an escalator, emerging on the South Bank, strolling along the Thames and snapping photos and stopping on benches to read my book whenever the sun came out. But then I'd be sitting there, the breeze flipping the pages of my book, not reading but wondering if I had enough to buy a panini and a tea at the little café tucked into the bridge arches near Waterloo. Some days I did have enough, and it was a perfect day, a day I could make a Polaroid snapshot in my mind and store as evidence that I'd made the right choice in coming here. And on days when I didn't have enough, and I went back to the flat and ate spaghetti with butter and stale Parmesan shaken from a can, it was still a perfectly good day for a broke grad student, getting by, not asking for help from my father or anyone.

Finally, I heard the ticket inspector coming down the carriage, pausing at each seat. I kept my head against the window, eyes closed, hands folded in my lap, my teaching textbook open on the tray table. I felt a blush rising and willed it away.

"Ticket, miss," the inspector said, standing over me. He had lowered his voice slightly, perhaps trying not to startle me awake, and the possibility of this-his kindness-filled me simultaneously with hope and self-loathing. I let my eyes flutter open.

"Oh, yes, I've got it here," I said, a bit breathless, reaching into both pockets to search for it. And then, with an apologetic smile, rummaging through my book bag as well.

My stomach was churning. I'd come to London to leave this feeling behind. I didn't like what it said about me-that I was still scraping together the same threadbare life I'd had back home. That I was capable of this deception. Morally and literally bankrupt. Today would be the last time, I decided.

Finally, I handed the inspector the ticket I'd purchased with my last pounds at Victoria station. With one hand he held the ticket, and with the other he brought out his hole-puncher to mark it spent. I did not breathe. Maybe he wouldn't look. Maybe he'd punch it, hand it back, and walk away, and I would be free.

"This ticket's for Haywards Heath."

My stomach dropped, and I felt the first beads of sweat form on my spine. I would have to do the full show, then. I summoned a smile. "Yes, that's right."

"You need a ticket to Brighton, miss."

"Oh, why?" I said, leaning on my American accent. "I'm only going as far as Haywards Heath."

The inspector looked away up the carriage, then back at me. "That was two stops ago. We're nearly to Brighton now."

"What?" I said, and made to stand, bumping into the tray table, tipping my textbook off and onto the floor, where notes and marked tests sprayed from its pages. The inspector bent for the book while I made a show of struggling to close the tray table.

"I've missed my stop?" I asked, letting in a small note of hysteria.

"She was sleeping the whole time, poor dear," the woman across the aisle said, unfurling a deeply posh accent. She handed some of my papers back.

The inspector nodded deferentially to the woman but continued to reach for his radio. "There are protocols for this kind of thing," he said to me. "You'll have to pay at the next station, I have to report it-"

Panic surged up my spine. "Oh, I knew this would happen," I interrupted. "I should've just gone straight to the school."

The inspector glanced at my textbook, still in his hand. The kindness had gone from his face; he was scrutinizing me now. I'd miscalculated. "You're a student?"

I had always looked young: something soft in my curved lips and heart-shaped face, girlish in my long, straight, dark blond hair. No doubt he'd encountered many broke, ticketless students in his time on the trains.

"No," I said, stepping out into the aisle. "I'm a teacher." I had dressed the part-a knee-length, collared shirt dress, belted at the waist, without a single wrinkle. Neat black flats. All purchased at H&M for less than £25, but exactly the bohemian-professional chic that all the high street shops were selling for £125. I'd pulled my hair back into a trim bun. "I was supposed to stay with a friend in Haywards Heath this weekend. I start at Roedean Monday morning."

Both the woman and the inspector looked at me with surprise.

The Roedean day and boarding school had not educated any actual royals, but it did the next best thing-welcoming their cousins, stepchildren, and inconvenient love children, plus the sons and daughters of Sussex aristocrats, international financiers, and various other new-money progeny. It was beautiful: huge Victorian halls of soft...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: G.P. Putnam's Sons
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2025
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0593545141
• ISBN 13: 9780593545140
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 384
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: G.P. Putnam's Sons; https://www.penguin.com/putnam/; ; 1745 BROADWAY Attn: Madison Forsander; NEW YORK; NY; 10019; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: preigu; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; 49078; Deutschland