Every Year After, the new Prime Video series based on Carley Fortune’s books Every Summer After and One Golden Summer, will be lakeside all summer. The Canadian-set series takes place in the fictional Barry’s Bay, where vacationers flock and a few locals have put down roots.
When we meet the adult Percy (Sadie Soverall), she lives on her own and works in Seattle, Washington. In the first episode, she gets a phone call from Barry’s Bay, British Columbia, all the way on the west coast of Canada, where she used to spend summers. The 250 area code matches the area too. They really want you to know that, when Percy packs up with her bestie Chantal (Aurora Perrineau) to go to a funeral in her childhood summer home, she’s crossing the country to BC.
This is different from where Barry’s Bay is in Every Summer After…
However, in the book, Barry’s Bay is a few hours outside of Ottawa in Ontario. If you know your geography, or recently familiarized yourself with Canadian lake and/or cottage country for some reason, you know that that’s on the other side of North America. It’s, obviously, much closer to Toronto as well, where Percy lives in the books.
Barry’s Bay is also a real place and where Fortune herself is from, according to Decider. It was the first place she wanted to set her first book.
“I grew up on the lake in Barry’s Bay,” she told Decider, “and our house was kind of on a dirt road in the bush. There were only three permanent residences on the road. The other houses were cottages. It would be very quiet in the winter, and then every summer it was full of action and kids. I grew up working at my family’s restaurant. It was very much like Sam and Charlie’s story in the book.”
So, why the change in the show? How come they changed the location and made it a fictional lake town instead of a real lake town? Who can say! The show filmed outside of Vancouver, British Columbia—so maybe that has something to do with it.
Every Year After almost made an even bigger change. “The thing I felt most strongly about was the setting and making sure the book was set in Canada,” Fortune told Decider. “The first version of the script that I read […] was set in a town called Barry’s Bend in Wisconsin.” At least they kept it in Canada, right? Wisconsin would have been a much bigger (and random) change.












