2020 Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Historical Fiction and for Debut Novel! Just after the Second World War, in the small English village of Chawton, an unusual but like-minded group of people band together to attempt something remarkable. One hundred and fifty years ago, Chawton was the final home of Jane Austen, one of England's finest novelists. Now it's home to a few distant relatives and their diminishing estate. With the last bit of Austen's legacy threatened, a group of disparate individuals come together to preserve both Jane Austen's home and her legacy. These people—a laborer, a young widow, the local doctor, and a movie star, among others—could not be more different and yet they are united in their love for the works and words of Austen. As each of them endures their own quiet struggle with loss and trauma, some from the recent war, others from more distant tragedies, they rally together to create the Jane Austen Society.

The internationally bestselling author of The Jane Austen Society returns with a compelling and heartwarming story of post-war London, a century-old bookstore, and three women determined to find their way in a fast-changing world. Bloomsbury Books is an old-fashioned new and rare book store that has persisted and resisted change for a hundred years, run by men and guided by the general manager's unbreakable fifty-one rules. But in 1950, the world is changing, especially the world of books and publishing, and at Bloomsbury Books, the girls in the shop have plans: Vivien Lowry: Single since her aristocratic fiancé was killed in action during World War II, the brilliant and stylish Vivien has a long list of grievances - most of them well justified and the biggest of which is Alec McDonough, the Head of Fiction. Grace Perkins: Married with two sons, she's been working to support the family following her husband's breakdown in the aftermath of the war. Torn between duty to her family and dreams of her own. Evie Stone: In the first class of female students from Cambridge permitted to earn a degree, Evie was denied an academic position in favor of her less accomplished male rival. Now she's working at Bloomsbury Books while she plans to remake her own future. As they interact with various literary figures of the time - Daphne Du Maurier, Ellen Doubleday, Sonia Blair (widow of George Orwell), Samuel Beckett, Peggy Guggenheim, and others - these three women with their complex web of relationships, goals and dreams are all working to plot out a future that is richer and more rewarding than anything society will allow.

"I'm in awe.... a thoroughly dazzling work of art." - Nina de Gramont, New York Times bestselling author of The Christie Affair In this new book from the author of The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls, a group of British and American expatriates in 1950s Rome become embroiled in controversy while making a movie about a female Italian resistance fighter during the occupation codenamed La Scolaretta: the Schoolgirl assassin. A surprise phone call from her late fiancé’s family sends Vivien Lowry of Bloomsbury Girls off on her next adventure. Struggling as a playwright, she moves to Italy both to reckon with her past and create a new future as a script-writer at the Cinecittà studios in Rome. Here she encounters the greatest male bastion of them all, the Vatican, and ends up entangled with the church and the censors while romantically caught between two men: an enigmatic American film financier who is not who he says he is, and a socialist Italian prince and independent filmmaker under house arrest over a censored screenplay. In this stand-alone novel, Jenner again brings to life a large and intriguing cast, each of whom has a wartime experience from their past that they must revisit in order to move on – Vivien most of all. With surprise appearances by characters from both The Jane Austen Society and Bloomsbury Girls, and cameos by screen legends such as Sophia Loren, Ava Gardner, and Gina Lollobrigida, Every Time We Say Goodbye captures both la dolce vita and the haunting, infinite legacy of war.