Every Summer After: The Version of Me I Haven't Met Yet (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9798240937040)

THE DEBUT NOVEL FROM JULIET ANDERS

"A gorgeous, gutting, gloriously alive debut. I read it in one sitting and thought about it for weeks. Juliet Anders writes about loss and recovery and the particular mercy of a place that asks nothing of you with a precision that made me want to press this book into the hands of every woman I know." - Clara Ashford

One career to define her. One fall to end it. One summer to find out who she is without it.

Valentina Greco gave everything to become extraordinary. Twenty-three years of sacrifice, discipline, and devotion to ballet - the early mornings, the empty plates, the ordinary life traded piece by piece for the extraordinary one. She was a principal dancer with Milan's La Scala. She was precise, devoted, and completely, entirely herself.

Until she wasn't.

One fall. Half an inch of bad luck. And everything she had built herself into was gone.

Two years later her physiotherapist sends her to Vernazza - a sun-drenched harbor town on the cliffs of the Italian Riviera - with three instructions: swim, walk, and stop performing. She arrives with a suitcase, a medical prescription, and the specific hollowness of a person who has lost the organizing principle of their life.

She did not plan for Signora Ferrante, who feeds her without permission and sits beside her without questions. She did not plan for Sera, who arrives with two coffees and a decision already made. She did not plan for a small girl spinning on a harbor wall who breaks something open in her chest that two years of rehabilitation never touched.

And she did not plan for Marco.

Warm, unhurried, former Michelin-starred chef who walked away from everything at the peak of it - who runs a harbor kitchen with no menu and no apologies, who puts bread in front of her on the first day like it is the most natural thing in the world and watches her eat it like he already understands everything the eating costs. Who sees the woman underneath the discipline and the damage and finds her, without ceremony or announcement, entirely worth knowing.

But until Valentina can make peace with the body that broke and the identity that went with it - until she can understand that surviving is not the consolation prize but the beginning of everything - she will never know whether the life waiting on the other side of losing everything might be bigger, and braver, and more completely hers than anything she built before.

Set across one luminous summer on the cliffs and harbors of Cinque Terre, Every Summer After is a warm, funny, achingly honest story about the self that remains when the self you built is gone - and the extraordinary courage it takes to let someone love that person before you have fully learned to love her yourself.