Next Year for Sure

After nine years together, Kathryn and Chris have the sort of relationship most would envy. They speak in the shorthand they have invented, complete one another’s sentences and help each other through every daily and existential dilemma. When Chris tells Kathryn about his attraction to Emily, a vivacious young woman he sees often at the laundromat, Kathryn encourages him to ask her out on a date–certain that her bond with Chris is strong enough to weather whatever may come.

 As Kathryn and Chris stumble into polyamory, Next Year, For Sure tracks the tumultuous, revelatory and often very funny year that follows. When Chris’s romance with Emily evolves beyond what anyone anticipated, both Chris and Kathryn are invited into Emily’s communal home, where Kathryn will discover new possibilities of her own. In the confusions, passions and upheavals of their new lives, both Kathryn and Chris will be forced to reconsider their past and what they thought they knew about love.

Offering a luminous portrait of a relationship from two perspectives, Zoey Leigh Peterson has written an empathic, beautiful and tremendously honest novel about a great love pushed to the edge. Deeply poignant and hugely entertaining, Next Year, For Sure shows us what lies at the mysterious heart of relationships, and what true openness and transformation require.

About the author

Zoey Leigh Peterson was born in England, grew up all over the United States and now lives in Canada. Her fiction has appeared in The Walrus, EVENT, Grain, PRISM international and has been anthologized in The Journey Prize Stories and Best Canadian Stories. She is the recipient of the Far Horizons Award for Short Fiction (The Malahat Review) and the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award (The New Quarterly). Next Year, For Sure is her first novel.

(from publisher)

Librarian’s comments

Unforgetable characters move in and out of each other’s lives in this contemporary novel about relationships and self reflection. The story focuses on a young couple, Chris and Kathryn, who have found each other after a series of bad relationships. When Chris becomes attreacted to a young free-spirited woman named Emily, he shares his feelings with Kathryn. She encourages him to follow his feelings. It’s one thing to take the high ground and extend her generosity towards Chris and Emily, but Kathryn’s emotions are soon in an uproar. The novel follows a year in the complex relationships of Peterson’s highly appealing characters. Their stories are humorous, dramatic, touching and above all, thoughtfully conceived.