For romance author Carley Fortune, summer is a time to relax and rediscover ourselves. Her latest novel, Meet Me at the Lake, offers readers an escape into Ontario cottage country.

In the bestselling romance, Meet Me at the Lake, Fern Brookbanks is constantly reliving the one perfect day she spent in her twenties with the charming Will Baxter. Now, as a 32-year-old, Fern manages her mother's Muskoka resort by the lake. Disillusioned with her life, Fern is shocked when Will shows up at her door, suitcase in hand, asking to help. Why is he here after all this time and more importantly, can she trust him to stay? Meet Me at the Lake is a heartwarming second chance love story which explores mental health and family relationships.

The romance novel will be championed on Canada Reads 2024 by Mirian Njoh. The debates will take place March 4-7, 2024. They will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem, CBC Listen and on CBC Books.

Fortune is a romance writer and journalist currently based in Toronto. She grew up in both Australia and in the small cottage town of Barry's Bay, Ont., where her debut novel Every Summer After takes place.

Fortune spoke with Ryan B. Patrick about lakes and love on the summer edition of The Next Chapter.

Your debut book, Every Summer After, was a clear breakout hit. It told the story of friends Persephone and Sam, who became lovers and it's set in Barry's Bay. What's your personal connection to cottage country?

I lived in Barry's Bay from Grade 4 until the end of high school on a very small dirt road, quite remote. I grew up very much like the character of Sam in the book. In the summer, there was so much time on the dock and swimming. Barry's Bay kind of explodes with tourists in the summer. It's a very sleepy working-class town but then in the summer you have people from Europe coming to see Algonquin Park or you have the cottagers coming back and I wanted to write about that experience.

What I love as a romance reader is watching two people who can feel very real going through real problems and trying to figure themselves out, trying to figure another person out and ultimately there is this happy ending. So you go on this very emotional journey but you feel safe. I needed that when I was reading in 2020, and I needed that as a writer. I think my books do look at tough subjects. Meet Me at the Lake deals with mental health, with grief and loss. But ultimately, I want to give people hope. I want people to feel like they've snooped on a real relationship and I want to give people an escape.

I began writing about six weeks following the birth of my second son and my mental health postpartum was not good. After my first son was born, I experienced postpartum OCD, which is marked by disturbing, intrusive thoughts and images. I didn't know what was happening to me at the time – it was very scary. It took me a long time to get help to tell people what was going on. With my second son, I did experience some of those thoughts but I knew what they were. I was better equipped to see them just as thoughts and kind of send them on their way.

I think it shapes the book a lot. The book does explore how parenthood affects us through a number of different characters, and that was not my intention. I was really grappling with some of my own feelings and insecurities about being a parent like Fern's mom, for instance. She's really good at her job and she throws herself into her work because she feels like it's the only place that she's doing well. I definitely have that fear that I'm much better as a worker than I am as a parent. The stories are not my stories, but I do work through my stuff in the book.

It's one of the tropes that is divisive: some people love it and some people hate it. What draws me to second chance romances is there's so much added tension when characters have a history. Also I find I can get deeper into the characters. We have all this development, how they've changed from whatever the relationship was, how their relationship to all their other aspects of life have changed from when these two characters were together in the past. As we get into our 30s, there are fewer and fewer opportunities to meet people and it feels real to me that people from our past come back into our romantic present. Whether romantic or not, there are just people who have been part of our lives and maybe they're not anymore, who are people you still think about. I call them, "people who stick to your ribs."

I think it means different things to each character. Fern's relationship to the lake is evolving. For her, the lake is really tied up in her childhood,which was fraught. She appreciates the beauty of the lake and what Fern finds this summer is that it's slowly becoming her happy place. She is settled in her life. She doesn't have the same resentments that she used to have about the resort and she's reconnecting with that place. I always find that when I go to the lake and I feel this sense of rejuvenation and newness. Every time I go to the lake it marks a new chapter of my life and I think about my life differently. I think we're able to reflect when we're in nature, and Fern is finding that this summer.