One Golden Summer
Carley Fortune, 2025
A drained photographer, the grandmother who gave her a camera, and the lake summer that started everything. Warm, witty and tinged with longing, it moves between Toronto family rooms and lake memories at an unhurried pace.
Feels like longing and wonder. About war.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy contemporary romance shaped by family history, creative burnout and summers by the water. The story leans on memory and domestic detail, so if you want a romance that stays tightly in the present, the Toronto flashbacks may feel slow.
Why read it
It gives you a warm, witty story about burnout and the family places that restore you, with a lakeside romance at its center.
A page from the book
The house that can swallow a childhood and hand it back whole.
Nan lives in Leaside, a leafy neighborhood in midtown Toronto. During those first hectic years after the twins were born, Heather and I slept at Nan and Grandpa’s on the weekends more often than we did in our own beds. Our home was a few streets over, but I loved this house best. The plump peonies that line the walkway. The homemade paisley curtains over the leaded glass windows. The doorbell that tolls as if announcing a newlywed couple. You can hear its thunderous ring in every corner of the redbrick Georgian, but to me, it’s the sound of calm and quiet. No screaming babies. No overwhelmed mother. A bedroom of my own. Carley Fortune.Fortune spent years as a newspaper and magazine editor in Toronto, the city where this novel begins, before turning to fiction full time.
Books that feel like this
More by Carley Fortune
Every Summer After
Carley Fortune, 2022
A sharp, warm second-chance romance about the summers that make us and the one person we never quite leave behind.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is One Golden Summer for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy contemporary romance shaped by family history, creative burnout and summers by the water. The story leans on memory and domestic detail, so if you want a romance that stays tightly in the present, the Toronto flashbacks may feel slow.
- What is One Golden Summer like?
- Warm, witty and tinged with longing, it moves between Toronto family rooms and lake memories at an unhurried pace. Feels like longing and wonder. About war.
- What should I read after One Golden Summer?
- If you liked One Golden Summer, try The Hotel Nantucket (Elin Hilderbrand), Good Material (Dolly Alderton) and Play Along (Liz Tomforde).
A taste of the feed
Why has no one invented a pill for the one thing that really hurts?
With all the advances in medicine and technology, why has someone not created a pill that cures heartbreak? Emotional penicillin. Why has someone not invented software that will sweep all traces of your ex out of your brain or an app that eliminates unrequited love?
The Hotel Nantucket · Elin Hilderbrand
Why letting go is never a single, clean decision.
You don’t let go once. That’s your first mistake. You say goodbye over a lifetime. You might not have thought about her for ten years, then you’ll hear a song or you’ll walk past somewhere you once went together - something will come to the surface that you’d totally forgotten about. And you say another goodbye. You have to be prepared to let go and let go and let go a thousand times.
Good Material · Dolly Alderton
To be the one always understood, and never the one doing the understanding.
I never had to beg for your attention, and I’m not sure you’ll ever fully understand how safe that became for me, knowing you were giving it to me willingly. I never had to ask you to see me, to understand me, and I’m sorry that I haven’t allowed you to be able to say the same. But I promise you, Isaiah, now that my eyes have been opened, I can’t keep them off you.
Play Along · Liz Tomforde
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