All That Life Can Afford

By: Emily Everett

Length: 10 hrs

Publisher's summary

A taut and lyrical coming-of-age debut about a young American woman navigating 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 the 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 sphinx-like 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 leave her old life behind. It’s like she’s stepped into the pages of a glittering new novel, but what will it cost her to play the part?

©2025 Emily Everett (P)2025 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

"There’s no one who romanticizes her life better than Anna Byrne, who has lived her whole life wishing she was a quirky Austenian heroine, and then suddenly, with some luck and a lot of nerve, she is. Languid, escapist, romantic, and just so fun to read, All That Life Can Afford feels like an amalgam of all the most interesting Austenian protagonists – except in this novel she is a millennial American from Massachusetts thrust into the wealthiest, most fashionable set of contemporary London. Emily Everett captures, with a wry smirk, the optimism and confusion of coming of age, of falling in love, and of trying to fit in – while everything threatens to fall apart. She asks the age-old question – if you change what you appear to be, can you change who you really are? Jane Austen would be proud." — Vanessa Chan, internationally bestselling author of The Storm We Made

"With a satisfying nod to Dickens and Austen, Everett's engrossing novel reminds us that we still live in a world stratified by class and money, where a young woman can easily lose her bearings to the seduction of belonging."—Nicola Kraus, #1 New York Times bestselling co-author of The Nanny Diaries