Tolerable

By Riley Camden and Justin Carver

HE CALLED HER TOLERABLE. SHE HAD IT ON VIDEO.

Elizabeth Bennet is twenty-eight, a preservation architect, and the person you call when you need to know why a building is still standing. At twenty-two she wrote an eighty-one-page study of the Meryton Grand - the dead theater at the end of her block - and sent it to eleven parties who all said no. So when a fund quietly buys the theater, the bakery, the laundromat, the bar, and her father's bookstore, she knows exactly what happens next. And when she overhears the man behind it call her "tolerable" at a launch party, her little sister's phone is already recording.

Four hundred thousand views later, the block is at war, and Elizabeth Bennet is its favorite weapon.

But Will Darcy has read all eighty-one pages. He's known about the clerestory windows for six years. And the fight over one city block is about to become something much more dangerous than a development battle - because pride is what you show a room, and the record is what you keep, and Elizabeth is about to learn how much she got wrong from behind a column in eleven words.

A modern PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, told as the memoir Elizabeth swears she'll never publish: a love story braided through a bakery that opens at four a.m., a bartender who keeps a notebook of debts she'll never collect, a twenty-two-minute voice memo in place of a letter, and a forty-year fight for the kind of neighborhood everyone claims to want and no one wants to pay for.

Sharp banter. Messy hearts. A forty-year lease.

For readers of Austen retellings and big-hearted book-club fiction - a slow-burn romance with brains, a full cast worth moving in with, and an ending that's earned twice: once on a rooftop, and once on a bench outside a bakery at half past six in the morning.

A NOTE FOR READERS: alongside its humor and romance, this novel thoughtfully addresses the grooming and exploitation of teenagers by an adult in a position of trust (non-graphic, aftermath-focused), a parent's medical emergency, chronic illness, and grief. Full guidance appears in the front matter.

Riley Camden's next novel, NOTICE, is coming next year.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: B0HBNBRHKC
• ISBN13: 9798189118654
• Release Date: July 2026
• Publisher: Independently Published
• Length: 572 Pages
• Weight: 1.44 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.3" x 5.5" x 8.5"