The following edition was used to create this guide: Everett, Emily. All That Life Can Afford. G. P. Putman's Sons (New York), 2025.

All That Life Can Afford by Emily Everett follows Anna: a young American graduate student who moves to London after her mother’s death, hoping to reinvent herself through academic study and independence. At the beginning of the novel, Anna tutors the children of wealthy North London families while working on her dissertation. Her closest friends, Liv and Andre, are fellow students who share her small, precarious world of part-time jobs and library study sessions. Through her work, Anna meets Pippa Wilder, a bright and inquisitive student, and gradually becomes entangled in the orbit of Pippa’s elder sister Faye and the latter’s affluent circle of friends. Drawn to their apparent ease and success, Anna begins dating a young man named Theo and befriends a law student Callum.

Anna’s desire to belong pushes her to live beyond her means. While living at one of the Wilder’s properties, she borrows Faye’s expensive clothes and pretends she is wealthier than she is. Her relationship with Theo becomes strained as his condescension grows clearer, and her friendship with Callum teeters between attraction and unease. When Faye exposes Anna’s financial struggles and accuses her of deceit during a New Year’s Eve party, the confrontation ends Anna’s relationship, employment, and social standing in one night. Ashamed and nearly broke, she retreats to Liv’s cramped flat, ashamed and nearly broke. She is unsure whether she can continue her degree.

With quiet persistence, Anna rebuilds her life. She works long hours at bartending, keeps up her research, and finds solace in the reading rooms of the British Library, where she drafts her dissertation’s final chapters. Professor Randolph, her advisor, offers both intellectual guidance and pragmatic help, ensuring she stays enrolled despite mounting tuition debt. When a private school refuses to pay her for teaching work, Anna turns to Callum, whose legal training and moral steadiness stand in sharp contrast to Theo’s arrogance. Their meeting in a London cemetery becomes an emotional turning point: Callum encourages her to stop seeking approval and to define her own success.

By the novel’s final chapters, Anna completes her dissertation and interviews for an apprenticeship at the British Library. Her ideas about expanding digital access to rare materials impress the staff. Although she is not chosen for the apprenticeship, she is offered a newly created position aligned with her vision. Meanwhile, Callum quietly resolves the legal dispute with the Wilders on her behalf. When he appears outside the Library on her first day of work, the two reconcile and finally acknowledge their mutual affection.

The closing scenes depict Anna moving into a modest new flat with Liv and Andre, establishing a home of her own. She places her mother’s ashes between her favorite Austen novels and a stack of travel maps, symbolizing the merging of her past, her grief, and her future. As Anna watches the London skyline at sunset with Callum and her friends, she realizes that belonging does not come from wealth or approval but from building a life grounded in authenticity and intuition.