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

All That Life Can Afford: Reese's Book Club

By Emily Everett

  • Release Date: 2025-04-01
  • Genre: Fiction & Literature
Score: 4
4
From 209 Ratings

Description

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.

Reviews

  • Great

    5
    By leigh22172
    Great read!
  • Loved it

    4
    By Roberta8924
    Nods to Jane Austen, a modern day retelling of Pride and Prejudice, in a way. Loved it.
  • Beautifully done

    5
    By EastonFam
    Such an enjoyable read…wonderful debut novel.
  • Lovely main character

    5
    By kaykaybean13
    I adored how the author implemented so many of Austens classics and the dissertation topic that Anna wrote. She had the rare opportunity to write from personal experiences and compare them to the stark social stratus’s between the wealthy and those below their statuses in society. While in London, trying desperately to begin anew from her mundane life in Massachusetts, she set off to find herself and become more than her lifelong social standing. Tutoring the elite with their SATs, she becomes close with a very privileged family with whom she becomes increasingly connected to their friends higher on the ladder socially than she’d ever been. Taking liberties that were risky and quite bold her plan to fit in by pretending by omission she was one of them backfired, and she learns rather quickly who her true friends were and who accepted her for herself rather than her financial and social standings.