In Five Years is the heartbreakingly beautiful book you need to read next month

“Love doesn’t require a future.”

In Five Years is the heartbreakingly beautiful book you need to read next month. Just make sure to have tissues nearby first. The book follows type-A Manhattan lawyer Dannie Cohen, who lives by the numbers. So, when she's asked where she sees herself in five years at a job interview - the job interview, the most important one of her career - she has her answer carefully plotted out. After she aces her interview and says 'yes' to her boyfriend David's proposal, it seems like everything in her five-year plan is going right as she wants it to. But when she wakes up, she’s suddenly in a different apartment, with a different ring on her finger, and beside a very different man. The television news is on in the background, and she can just make out the scrolling date. It’s the same night—December 15—but 2025, five years in the future.

 

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A post shared by Rebecca Serle (@rebecca_serle) on Feb 23, 2020 at 7:53am PST

After a very intense, shocking hour, Dannie wakes again, just before midnight, back in 2020. She can’t shake what has happened. It certainly felt much more than merely a dream, but she isn’t the kind of person who believes in visions. That nonsense is only charming coming from free-spirited types, like her lifelong best friend, Bella. Determined to ignore the odd experience, she files it away in the back of her mind. That is, until four-and-a-half years later, when by chance Dannie meets the very same man from her long-ago vision. It's not the typical kind of romance novel. Yes, there's Dannie and David - and even Dannie and her 'mystery man'. But it's more about the relationship between Dannie and her childhood best friend, Bella: the ups and downs, the loss, the love and the hope that they experienced. The blurb for the novel (and the first half of the book) seem ready to steer the reader in one direction. But as the story starts to develop, it spins on its heel and brings you down a totally different path - and to an ending that you won't be forgetting any time soon. In Five Years is a heartbreaking, beautiful and read-in-one-sitting kind of book that will have you bawling by the end of the last page. In Five Years, published by Quercus, is out on March 5.